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The Wellness Institute at Seven Oaks General Hospital

When it comes to the importance of quality worklife (QWL), Carol Deckert doesn’t mince words: it takes healthy workers in healthy environments to create healthy outcomes for patients.

“How can one deliver quality health care to Canadians if we and the organizations in which we work are sick?” she asks. “Caregivers themselves need to be whole, well and full of positive energy in order to assist in the healing of others.”

As Senior Director of Winnipeg’s Wellness Institute, Canada’s leading medical fitness facility located at Seven Oaks General Hospital (SOGH), Carol has seen the benefits of QWL in action. She is responsible for workplace health and wellness programming internally for SOGH, as well as on a fee-for-service basis to other local organizations including the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA).

Deckert’s passion for the business of promoting QWL was born out of necessity in the mid 90s, when a painful downsizing of the SOGH and a severe nursing shortage left the hospital desperate to find ways to keep productive employees and attract skilled workers to fill vacancies.

The crisis prompted SOGH’s leadership to tackle the issue head-on. “We had two things working in our favour,” recalls Deckert. “First, we had a new CEO who valued QWL and knew it was a way out of this crisis.”

“We had to keep productive workers on the job and that meant preventing injuries and keeping our workforce happy and healthy by avoiding illness and chronic disease,” she reasons. “From an organizational health standpoint, we wanted staff to feel a sense of belonging; that their contributions are valued, that their opinions are heard, that they have a voice in decision-making and that they continue to learn.”

To do this, SOGH took the essential first step of formally integrating health and QWL into its business strategies, values and mission to help reduce sick time, overtime costs and long-term disability claims, as well as improve retention and recruitment.

“The second thing we had going for us was the newly created Wellness Institute (WI),” notes Deckert. “We used the mandate of the WI -- to improve the health and well-being not just of SOGH employees but of our whole community – along with WI’s resources to develop tools and programs that would help us to achieve this goal.”

A key tool in the evolution of WI’s quality worklife arsenal was the creation of a Health Risk Appraisal (HRA), which identifies employee health risks and aggregate organizational risks.

The HRA measures individual health status and behaviour as well as job satisfaction, perceived workload and stress issues, organizational climate and support, along with work-life balance.

“The HRA provides confidential feedback for the individual employee to change their lifestyle and reduce their personal risks, as well as directions the organization can take to support individual efforts, respond to problem areas and proactively plan a healthier workplace,” explains Deckert.

This unique two-pronged approach helps workers privately assess their own health risks and strengths and gives them information that supports positive lifestyle changes.

However, Deckert cautions that to have a healthy and happy workforce organizations need to do more than just focus on individual employees – they have to examine how the entire organization either helps or hinders positive physical, social and mental health.

“For example, the HRA serves as a report card of how we are doing as an organization, what our communication is like, plus a range of other key indicators like job satisfaction, job coping, workloads, stress, and job support,” she says.

The Wellness Institute uses the results of the HRA to guide its QWL initiatives and repeats the exercise every two years, allowing management to evaluate which the interventions made a difference and identifying emerging issues.

“The beauty of this approach is that the interventions all come from the voice of the staff -- they tell us how we are doing collectively and we listen,” says Deckert.

From this work the WI created a Healthy Organization Steering Committee to guide the hospital’s QWL efforts through a formal vision, mission, and framework comprised of four ‘value’ streams: health promotion; injury treatment and prevention; work-life balance; plus training development including reward and recognition.

A particularly strong component of the WI’s healthy organization strategy is its comprehensive Workplace Wellness Program. The diverse initiative includes a state-of-the-art onsite fitness facility and day care, plus smoking cessation programs, injury prevention and rehabilitation programs, health screenings, campaigns and interventions for improved sleep, alcohol use, weight management, physical activity, nutrition, and green transportation.

The WI even employs less conventional methods to inspire positive behaviors and attitudes among employees.

“We have ‘Wellness Fairies’ who visit all parts of the facility on a regular basis dropping off items for staff with a health message…it could be a piece of fruit for a healthy snack, a gratitude journal, or a whiteboard magnet for the fridge that helps encourage healthy meal planning,” exclaims Deckert. “We also work with individual departments to help improve issues such as communication or respectful workplaces.”

In addition to this plethora of healthy activities, the WI has been piloting a new trio of organizational health programs, including:

a change program for departments to improve work culture related to respectful interpersonal relationships;
a variation on SOGH’s formal reward and recognition program and annual awards that helps managers and work units increase awareness of and implement reward and recognition specifically within their own areas; and
a Mental Health strategy, led by SOGH’s own managers and leaders.

The results of SOGH’s passion for using QWL to its advantage speak for themselves.

For example, staff levels of physical inactivity, smoking and excess weight have been universally reduced from the initial HRA to the follow-up HRA. As well, Workers’ Compensation costs for SOGH are less than the average for other employers in the Winnipeg region, as are the hospital’s RN vacancy rates.

Among its recruitment achievements, SOGH can boast being a McLean’s magazine ‘Top 100 Employer’ for a number of years, as well as a ‘Top 20 Employer’ in Manitoba. The organization is even a multi-year winner of the title ‘Best Employer for 50+ Canadians’.

This dramatic positive shift for both SOGH and its employees is no small feat. As Deckert puts it, “At times changing the culture of the healthcare system seems like moving a mountain. It can be difficult, isolating work and it’s easy to become discouraged if you feel like one voice in the wilderness.”

This is precisely why SOGH is such a strong supporter of the Quality Worklife Quality Healthcare Coalition (QWQHC). “Knowing that others care about QWL too and are trying to achieve the same goals gives us hope and renewed energy,” confides Deckert. “We can accomplish much more together, sharing ideas and strategies than we can on our own.”

“The QWQHC fits so perfectly with SOGH’s values and philosophy,” furthers Deckert. “We are in a position of trying to influence other healthcare organizations in our region and province, so in fact we’re trying to do the same work.”

“There is strength in numbers and the more like-minded individuals work together to promote the many benefits of QWL, the more we can accomplish,” she concludes.

For more information on Seven Oaks General Hospital or its Wellness Institute, please visit www.sogh.winnipeg.mb.ca or www.wellnessinstitute.ca.