When you support Grand River Hospital, you not only make a significant difference for local patients and their families, but you have a vital impact on hospital staff by making it possible to offer additional programs to promote team member health and wellness. By ensuring our hospital teams are taken care of, you in turn help them provide exceptional care right here in our community for everyone who needs it.

Last spring marked a big milestone on the hospital’s path to enhanced team health and wellness when they introduced a Team Member Well-being Consultant role that is dedicated to supporting staff. Generously funded by the Hallman Foundation, this role supports staff both through day-to-day activities and long-term, strategic initiatives. With support from our great community, the following are just a few of the initiatives in our action plan to promote team member well-being at Grand River Hospital.

Therapy Dogs

In collaboration with St. John Ambulance, Grand River Hospital launched a trial program to provide our team members with onsite access to therapy dogs earlier this year. Pet therapy has many benefits, including the ability to lower a person’s stress level, improve their mood and generally help them cope.

Well-being on Wheels

Well-being on Wheels is a program in which the Team Member Well-being Consultant and other key leaders visit the clinical units with a cart of resources, snacks and giveaways. The goal of this program is to connect with frontline staff, receive their feedback, and demonstrate our gratitude for them and their work at the hospital.

Training and Education

Hospital team members have identified training and education as a current priority that impact their health and wellness in the workplace, so with your help, we are offering more opportunities and resources for staff learning and development. These include medical training resources like simulator machines and virtual reality training that will help our teams improve their clinical competencies; enhanced emergency department training for new nurses; and the Learning Development Fund, which offers more flexibility and twice as much funding for team members to pursue training and educational opportunities compared to its predecessor, the Tuition Assistance Program. The Learning Development Fund can be put toward college and university courses, certificate programs, professional courses, conferences, workshops, seminars, webinars and more.

Your Health Space

A great upcoming initiative is the Your Health Space program in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association. We will offer a three-hour facilitated workshop for our leaders on supporting their teams’ mental health followed by sessions designed for our frontline team members. We know clinical staff often can’t get away for an hour to do a workshop, so instead we will bring this training to them right on the units. This training is designed to help organizations, teams, and individuals address chronic workplace stress and promote psychological health and safety practices by providing the training, resources, and tools needed to encourage complex conversations and support health care staff in the workplace.

We know our hospital team members can only do their best work when they have the skills, resources and opportunity to first care for themselves and their own health and well-being. You enable a higher level of team member retention and contribute to creating an environment where our staff are proud to work and feel safe, respected and valued. And by supporting mental health and wellness for our teams, you also elevate patient care and enhance the hospital experience for patients, care partners and families alike. To learn more about all of the ways you can support hospital staff and promote staff health and well-being, visit our Support for Staff Collection.