- October 19, 2022
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- 8 minutes read
Zen lounges, yoga helping HCA Houston nurses relieve stress – Houston Chronicle
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Lisa Welty, Magnet program director, , left, Teresa McIntrye, with University of Houston College of nursing, and Sherry Camacho, chief nursing officer, right, talk at HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022, in Webster.
Lisa Welty, Magnet program director, , left, Teresa McIntrye, with University of Houston College of nursing, and Sherry Camacho, chief nursing officer, right, talk at HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022, in Webster.
Sherry Camacho, chief nursing officer, talks at HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022, in Webster.
When an intensive care unit patient died earlier this month at HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake, clinical nurse coordinator Madison Chollett asked the patient’s nurse to join her in one of the hospital’s Zen lounges.
Coping with a patient’s death is difficult, and Chollett recognized the nurse needed a brief respite. The serene lounge, which features soothing music and massage chairs, gave the nurse a chance to mourn for a few minutes before heading back to work.
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“We don’t really ever have a quiet moment in nursing,” Chollett said. “This gives back those moments you may not get for 13 or 15 hours.”
The Zen lounges are just one example of a cultural shift at HCA Houston Healthcare, which is focusing on improving the mental health and well-being of nurses through a series of initiatives at its Clear Lake and Mainland campuses. The goal is to alleviate stress and avoid burnout, issues that predated the COVID-19 pandemic but worsened during the crisis.
Every Wednesday, a “wellness wagon” delivers stress-relieving goodies to nurses. There are yoga sessions where nurses learn a “pose of the week” designed to help them relax. And a pilot program at the Clear Lake campus is testing “uninterrupted lunch breaks,” because a survey found nurses were being interrupted 10 to 15 times each lunch.
The focus on the nurses comes as many still feel the effects of the pandemic. Last year, an American Nurses Foundation survey found that more than one-third of 9,500 respondents did not feel emotionally healthy. Three-quarters felt stressed, and 62 percent felt overwhelmed. Perhaps most troubling: 21 percent of nurses said they planned to leave the profession within six months, while another 29 percent said they were considering quitting.
Nurses have always been more stressed than other health care workers, partly because they are the primary caregiver for patients, said Dr. Teresa McIntyre, a University of Houston College of Nursing research professor who has studied the issue. That can take an emotional and physical toll.
During the pandemic, nurses were caring for more patients and seeing more of them suffer or die, McIntyre said. The fear of bringing the virus home led to stress in their personal lives, too.
“We talk about long COVID, but we also have to talk about the long-term effects that all of this traumatic experience had on the nursing workforce,” McIntyre said. “Not just in terms of their emotional well-being but in terms of the nursing profession itself.”
McIntyre and Lisa Welty, the Magnet program director at the Clear Lake campus, were part of a research team that conducted an online survey to gauge the scale of the problem at HCA Houston Healthcare. The results were comparable to the nationwide ANF survey: 58 percent reported symptoms of depression and 65 percent reported at least moderate burnout. Although most nurses remained committed to the profession, the stress had one-fourth of them considering another career.
The results were eye-opening, said Sherry Camacho, the chief nursing officer at the Clear Lake campus. Something needed to change.
“Nurses, nursing teams, physicians — they all stepped up at a time when the community needed them the most,” Camacho said. “…It’s time now we step up and provide those same resources and support as they navigate through (post-traumatic stress disorder), burnout, stress and anxiety.”
The researchers conducted the survey from January to April 2021, as the U.S. was beginning to roll out the COVID-19 vaccines. The survey didn’t just ask about the problem; it also asked nurses about possible solutions.
Approximately half of respondents said they would prefer to manage stress through restorative breaks, relaxation exercises, music therapy and exercise classes. More than one-third wanted yoga and meditation.
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The Clear Lake campus organized peer-to-peer support groups, where nurses could talk about their experiences. That represented a notable change for many veteran nurses, who have spent their careers acting as “fixers” and weren’t used to admitting they might need help, Camacho said.
“We’re learning, as older nurses, to speak a new language. A language that we’re not familiar with,” she said. “That’s the cultural shift that we need to create in these work environments.”
Over the summer, the campus converted existing spaces, such as meeting rooms, into three Zen lounges where employees can take a relaxing break. The lounges have massage chairs, scented candles, soothing music and yoga mats; one also has a pullup bar because an employee requested it.
Several nurses asked Welty for a therapy dog. Animal-assisted therapy is not uncommon for patients, but it was the first time employees could benefit from petting a dog.
“It is really amazing, witnessing that,” Welty said. “Some staff will get on the floor with the dog and just start crying.”
Dozens of nurses came to a recent Wellness Wagon Wednesday, where they received skin care masks, lavender tea and stress balls. They also learned the yoga pose of the week, tree pose, which strengthens the legs and core and can improve balance and stability.
The mental health and wellness initiatives are still in the early stages, and there’s more work to be done, Camacho said. The health system is looking to add resiliency training to new employee orientation, so nurses will be equipped with knowledge to help manage stress. HCA Houston Healthcare also plans to hire a mental health ambassador to oversee all the wellness initiatives.
The researchers are collecting data on the initiatives to determine which are having the greatest impact. Each Zen lounge has a QR code that directs employees to a six-question survey that gauges how they were feeling when they entered and whether they felt better afterward. They intend to publish their findings in a medical journal, McIntyre said. Because nurse burnout is a nationwide problem, they hope these local initiatives can help others across the U.S.
“The knowledge that can be generated from this is not just for HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake,” McIntyre said “It is kind of a pilot program that can inform other initiatives across the HCA system, and as well as across other hospital systems.”
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Evan MacDonald is a features reporter for the Houston Chronicle, covering health and wellness for ReNew Houston.
He joined the Chronicle in 2022 after working at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, where he covered health. He’s also worked for news organizations in New York and Massachusetts.
A Boston native, Evan graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He enjoys trivia and movies and is a fan of all Boston sports teams, for which he apologizes in advance.
He can be reached on Twitter at @evanmac3 or via email at [email protected].