Are you using the ANA tools and resources?

ANA offers tools and guidance to help you be your best

As an RN, you invest much of your time and energy into making sure patients follow their treatment plans and do everything they can to improve their health and wellness. But are you taking the same steps to boost your own physical, mental and spiritual health and well-being? The American Nurses Association (ANA) recommends that you do — for the benefit of both you and your patients.
Now, there’s a way to evaluate your own health and wellness, and compare how you’re doing to other RNs as well as the overall population. Also, you can assess the health and safety of your work environment, including risks such as ergonomic injuries, sharps injuries, and bullying and workplace violence, and measure it against that of your nursing colleagues across the country.
In November, ANA launched the HealthyNurse^TM Health Risk Appraisal and Web Wellness Portal in collaboration with Pfizer Inc — online tools for all RNs and RN students to assess their health and wellness. The survey provides valuable data on your individual health risks as well as how you compare against ideal benchmarks.  The website component of the appraisal allows survey-takers to find resources on topics for which  they want more education or want to focus on improvement.
ANA encourages all RNs and nursing students to take the free online Health Risk Appraisal to build a comprehensive database of nurses’ health and their work environments. The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete. You can find the survey at www.anahra.org.
What is a HealthyNurse?
The HealthyNurse Health Risk Appraisal and Web Wellness Portal is a component of ANA’s HealthyNurse  program.  In October, ANA’s Board of Directors adopted a new  HealthyNurse definition and related constructs to guide the program and associated initiatives.
ANA defines a HealthyNurse as one who actively focuses on creating and maintaining a balance and synergy of physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, personal and professional well-being. A healthy nurse lives life to the fullest capacity, across the wellness to illness continuum, as they become stronger role models, advocates, and educators, personally, for their families, their communities and work environments, and ultimately for their patients.  The constructs further advise nurses that, adherence to each of these constructs enhances the healthy nurse’s full capacity to care. Nurses whose practice is characterized by the HealthyNurse  constructs can function to their highest potential, personally and professionally.
Five constructs of the HealthyNurse
•  Calling to Care — Caring is the interpersonal, compassionate offering of self by which the healthy nurse builds relationships with patients and their families, while helping them meet their physical, emotional, and spiritual goals, for all ages, in all health care settings, across the care continuum.
•  Priority to Self-Care — Self-care and supportive environments enable the healthy nurse to increase the ability to effectively manage the physical and emotional stressors of the work and home environments.
•  Opportunity to Role Model — The healthy nurse confidently recognizes and identifies personal health challenges in themselves and their patients, thereby enabling them and their patients to overcome the challenge in a collaborative, non-accusatory manner.
•  Responsibility to Educate — Using non-judgmental approaches, considering adult learning patterns and readiness to change, the healthy nurse empowers themselves and others by sharing health, safety, and wellness knowledge, skills, resources and attitudes.
•  Authority to Advocate — The healthy nurse is empowered to advocate on numerous levels, including personally, interpersonally, within the work environment and the community, and at the local, state, and national levels in policy development and advocacy.
Visit http://anahealthynurse.org for valuable resources and to participate in ANA’s HealthyNurse^TM Health Risk Appraisal.

— Adam Sachs is a public relations writer at ANA.

Workplace Initiatives That Promote Diversity and Inclusion

As the United States becomes more of a melting pot, encouraging and nurturing a workplace that welcomes the different cultures, ethnicities, and lifestyles of staff are paramount to optimal collaboration, productivity, and success. In health care, where diversity increasingly is exemplified among patients as well as employees, such an embrace is critical to achieving best outcomes.
Health care institutions across the country are heeding the call for inclusion. Many have implemented initiatives to not only attract diverse staff, but also to keep and engage them.
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for instance, launched the Multicultural Nurses Mayo Employee Resource Group (MNMERG) in July 2014 to recruit and retain nurses from diverse cultures and offer them professional support and networking opportunities. The MNMERG also mentors and educates Mayo’s diverse nurses and involves them in community programs.
With some 25 members, the MNMERG welcomes all Mayo staff. It meets monthly at the hospital, but this year will add quarterly dinners off site and is evaluating online technologies such as Skype and Sharepoint to “engage a 24/7 workforce,” says MNMERG cochair Deborah A. Delgado, MS, RN-BC, a nursing education specialist in psychiatry.
Mayo Employee Resource Groups (MERGs) have been an important component of Mayo’s overall diversity initiative; the goal is to have the following five core MERGs—African American, LGBTI, Hispanic, Disability, and Veterans—at Mayo’s three major clinical sites. Each MERG has an executive sponsor who is a leader at Mayo, but not a member of the group. For example, the MNMERG’s sponsor is a male cardiologist with experience in developing family/patient advisory groups. All of Mayo’s MERGs have formally chartered to align with at least one of the organization’s strategic diversity goals.
“These range from culturally competent care to inclusion and addressing health disparities,” says Sharonne N. Hayes, MD, FACC, FAHA, director of diversity and inclusion and professor of medicine at the Women’s Heart Clinic at Mayo. She notes that the groups share innovations and hold cross activities. “By that collaboration,” she says, “you get more hands to do the work obviously, but you also get a wonderful side product of some cross-cultural mentoring and some cross-cultural experience.”
While the MNMERG is in its infancy, feedback has been positive. “By being visible, by engaging, and by contributing, it just leads to retainment,” Delgado offers. “People want to stay because they’re able to use all of their gifts and talents to affect the organization’s purpose and goals.”
The Clinical Leadership Collaborative for Diversity in Nursing (CLCDN) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has realized recruitment and retention success with diverse students of nursing. A scholarship and mentoring program established in 2007 by Partners HealthCare (PHC), an integrated system of which Mass General is a member, the CLCDN draws applicants from the nursing program at University of Massachusetts Boston.
Students must demonstrate leadership qualities, have cumulative general and nursing GPAs of 3.0 or higher, and must be entering their junior year of study since the CLCDN will carry them through their senior year. They link with racially and ethnically diverse nurse mentors, attend unit meetings and social and educational events, and observe nurses and nursing leaders in action. Additionally, they receive a stipend and financial support for tuition and fees with the expectation they will pursue employment at a PHC institution after graduating.
“When you’re a minority and you’re going into an environment where you might be the only diverse person on your clinical unit, as an example, it can be really challenging; it can be very lonely,“ says Gaurdia E. Banister, PhD, RN, FAAN, the PHC CLCDN liaison to UMass Boston and executive director of the hospital’s Institute for Patient Care. “We wanted to put mechanisms in place to ensure the success of our students and, certainly once they graduated, the best possible [career] alternatives,” she says.
Mass General diverse nurse leaders who have successfully navigated such waters can “provide these wonderful, wonderful pearls of wisdom and support and encouragement and listening skills,” explains Banister, and they serve as mentors, as do CLCDN graduates. Of the 54 mentors to date (32 from Mass General), some are repeats. Other statistics are just as impressive—such as PHC’s 82.6% hiring rate among the 69 graduates thus far (47.8% of whom have been employed by Mass General) and the almost 80% retention rate for these graduates.
“They love being a nurse. It’s exactly what they anticipated their career to be,” says Banister. “They are constantly promoting how positive it has been for them and that they feel like our organizations are becoming much more of a welcoming and diverse place to work.”
At the Cleveland Clinic, location-specific Diversity Councils at each of the enterprise’s community hospitals and family health centers are effectively supporting and sustaining an inclusive work environment. These employee-led councils implement action plans and sponsor activities based on strategies and goals defined by an Executive Diversity Council, all aimed to enhance employee engagement and cultural competence.
While the Executive Diversity Council works “to set the tone and the agenda,” the location-specific councils “serve as the tactical team,” explains Diana Gueits, director of diversity and inclusion. The main-campus council, for one, formed the Nursing Cultural Competence Committee and the Disability Task Force; the task force, in turn, developed the Disability Etiquette Lunch ’n Learn, a program to assist caregivers in their interaction and communication with disabled individuals that has since been taken enterprise-wide. Gueits notes the councils share and cross-pollinate ideas.
Cleveland Clinic’s chief nursing officer sits on the Executive Diversity Council, and many nurses participate in the location-specific councils with several diverse nurses serving in leadership roles (the councils overall represent a cross-section of the clinic’s workforce). Two cochairs and a cochair-elect lead each council, act as local ambassadors for diversity, engage with executive leadership, and provide feedback to the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which facilitates the business-like, SMART-goals approach of the councils.
“This is a passion for them,” says Gueits of the cochairs, who are selected based on their experience in leading transformative teams and their commitment to diversity and inclusion. “I think that what the councils provide them is an opportunity to see, to actually be part of an initiative and be part of that process from A to Z.”
Cleveland Clinic has 21 location-specific councils, a number that is sure to increase as the enterprise expands. “That is the intention,” Gueits says, “to make sure that we embed diversity and inclusion in our commitment to all our locations and give an opportunity or platform for all our caregivers to be engaged.”

Julie Jacobs is an award-winning writer with special interest and expertise in health care, wellness, and lifestyle. Visit her at www.wynnecommunications.com.

Julie Jacobs