Dr Mila Felder Shares Targeted Education Approaches to Promote Well-Being

Moral distress and trauma care education are just some of the components to promoting well-being in the oncology workforce, says Mila Felder, MD, FACEP, emergency physician and vice president for Well-Being for All Teammates at Advocate Health.

Transcript

What is the role of immediate, targeted education in promoting well-being among your workforce, and how does Advocate Health ensure that this education remains relevant and effective amidst evolving challenges?

I think in this case, the best way to answer this question is to offer an example. Through our peer support work, and through trauma informed care education, we fall into moral distress examples like the one I shared. We found that there are components of training that people receive well when they are short and very targeted. Kim Miller, [PhD, director, Advocate Trauma Recovery Center,] who does this work for example, and Amy Bovie, [compliance officer, Aurora Health Care,] put together modules through trauma-informed care and ethics. Mission spiritual care was very involved. It could be as short as 15 minutes or as long as 45 minutes. People could sign up online, then we use public affairs to promote and incentivize or very specifically ask our leaders to take. There is a module on moral distress and there is one on trauma-informed communications. Through building those modules, we also started doing things like empowering leaders and providing training to leaders to take care of their own well-being, so they empower others.

However, what we realized as this organization grew bigger and bigger is that many of those things, especially as they get longer, are perceived as “one more thing I have to do for my work for you.” And so, what we're doing now is taking the components of this training—it's still available online through the same training modules with the same CME [continuing medical education] and the same CEU [continuing education uUnits] that’s offered—but we're also weaving them into onboarding and orientation, to leadership training and development. So, our existing leaders, our incoming leaders, and every one of our teammates gets a sense of what are we looking for with that culture of well-being. What is that peer support program? What are some of the tools that are available so that we're not asking them to go and do one more component of training which is available? They can take it and it's targeted, but they're also getting the idea of why we're doing it, and why it's about them and for them, first and foremost.