Professional Wellbeing

You care about your workforce and your hospital, but it can be hard to know where to focus for the biggest impact to improve professional wellbeing. Individual resources for healthcare workers offer a strong starting point in providing support, but addressing workplace policies and practices is the best way to reduce burnout and strengthen professional wellbeing.¹ Whether you need to fine-tune quality improvements, establish new workflows, or help staff feel safe getting support, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s (NIOSH) Impact Wellbeing™ campaign has the resources to help hospital leaders build a system where healthcare workers thrive.

Why Focus on Professional Wellbeing?

Burnout doesn’t discriminate—it exists across departments and job titles. Research has shown that employers can support employee wellbeing by adjusting workplace policies and procedures. Examples include providing adequate paid leave, increasing autonomy and flexibility over job tasks, improving the work environment, and more. ⁶ Addressing working conditions also helps to address costs associated with staff turnover and optimize patient outcomes. ¹

By identifying and implementing practical operational adjustments, you can improve retention and help healthcare workers continue doing what they do best—delivering the highest quality patient care. ⁷ Here are some tips and resources you can use to make professional wellbeing a core part of your workplace. 

Model Professional Wellbeing Practices for Your Workforce

Improved professional wellbeing starts with leaders committing to and modeling positive workplace culture practices. Research shows that supportive leadership can be an important factor in reducing the negative effects of job stress. ^{8, 9} It is critical to collaborate with your workforce when promoting a positive workplace culture. ¹⁰ Give workers more flexibility and control over their working conditions and schedules whenever possible. Ask employees how their working conditions and schedules can better support their safety, health, and wellbeing.

How hospital leaders run their departments directly impacts their abilities to have a strong workplace culture, cultivate an engaged workforce, and deliver high-quality patient care. Here are four ways you can model professional wellbeing in your hospital:

Ensure a Safe Work Environment

Even before the pandemic, healthcare workers faced increasing cases of workplace violence and harassment.² You can help make sure that healthcare workers feel safe at work by ensuring their wellbeing is valued as much as patient satisfaction. Here are some steps you can take to prioritize a safe work environment:

• Remove barriers to reporting incidents of violence and harassment. Your hospital’s reporting procedures should empower healthcare workers to come forward without fear of retaliation when incidents of violence occur. Make the process simple and transparent and ensure your workforce knows that leadership takes incidents seriously and will act upon them in a timely manner.¹⁴
•  Provide violence prevention training to employees. Train supervisors and employees on how to respond when witnessing harassment, discrimination, bullying, or violence in the workplace. NIOSH’s free online course, Workplace Violence Prevention for Nurses, offers continuing education credits. The American Hospital Association recommends bystander training and cognitive rehearsal training in its suicide prevention toolkit.
•  Support your workforce after upsetting events. Ensure that worker safety and wellbeing are valued as much as patient satisfaction in these conversations. The American Hospital Association developed a framework for providing trauma support to healthcare workers following an incident or threat of violence.
•  Ensure adequate staffing. Adequate staffing can improve both worker and patient safety.² Explore resources from the Workplace Change Collaborative for guidance on safe and appropriate staffing, optimizing teams, and reducing administrative burdens.

Show Your Commitment Through Action

Although some causes of burnout can take more time to address, there are achievable steps you can take to champion a healthy workforce and hospital system now. To get started, here are two actions to improve professional wellbeing in your hospital:

1. Administer the NIOSH Worker Well-Being Questionnaire (WellBQ) to understand how your workforce is doing and identify ways to improve healthcare worker wellbeing at your hospital.
2. Access and use existing tools from leading experts in the field of healthcare worker mental health, such as:
   

   Healthcare workers fear losing their credentials because of overly broad and invasive mental health questions that are stigmatizing and discriminatory. ^{14, 15, 16}

   • Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation Toolkit, which can help hospital leaders remove intrusive mental health questions from their credentialing applications and make it safe for staff to seek the mental health care they might need.
   • NIOSH’s Fundamentals of Total Worker Health^®*, which can help hospital leaders improve the safety, health, and wellbeing of their workforce by developing new Total Work Health (TWH) initiatives or better align existing workplace interventions with the TWH approach.

Communicate Often With Your Staff

Clear, consistent, and open communication with staff is an essential part of professional wellbeing. Maintaining transparent, ongoing communication with your workforce builds trust and ensures that your commitment to professional wellbeing is communicated to your workforce. ¹⁸

Additionally, establishing channels for two-way communication between hospital leadership and healthcare workers (such as open Q&A sessions during department meetings) allows staff to provide input and ask questions about system-changes to improve professional wellbeing and demonstrates that you value your staff’s input.

Total Worker Health^® is a registered trademark of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).