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.