A $2.14 million grant will be used by the University of Virginia to bolster the Wisdom and Wellbeing Peer Support Training Program, which helps healthcare workers and first responders deal with stress and burnout.
The University of Virginia is using more than $2 million in federal funding to bolster an innovative new program aimed at helping stressed healthcare workers and first responders.
A $2.14 million grant form the Health and Human Services Administration, using money from the American Rescue Plan and Lorna Breen Act, will support the Wisdom and Wellbeing Peer Support Training Program, launched by Richard Westphal, a professor at the UVA School of Nursing, and Margaret Plews-Ogan, MD, MS, chief of the Division of General Medicine, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at UVA’s Department of Medicine.
The program is one of many being launched or expanded across the country to deal with soaring rates of stress, depression and burnout in the healthcare ranks. In many cases they’re using new technologies or strategies to expand their reach and improve access to care and resources.
“I have been doing this work for 30 years, and it's been in the last 24 months that the world has discovered that [healthcare worker burnout] is a thing,” Westphal said in a UVA release. “We're going to be using the $2.1 million to train broadly across the entire health system — [the medical] school, nursing school, and healthcare workers in the five-county area — how to use wisdom and resilience practices to support each other.”
The program aims to take the support skills that healthcare workers and first responders are trained to use on others in distress and apply them to colleagues and peers. Westphal and Plews-Ogan note that many frontline workers who prioritize helping others fail to recognize or deal properly with stressors in their own lives.
“One good thing about [the pandemic] is that it brought absolutely front and center the stressors that the healthcare workforce was already beginning to groan under … so it actually could be dealt with,” Plews-Ogan said in the news release.
The federal money will be used, in part, to expand the program to include Charlottesville City and UVA facilities and clinics in surrounding counties. Westphal said it will now reach frontline workers in remote parts of the state that often don’t have easy access to these resources.
Eric Wicklund is the associate content manager and senior editor for Innovation, Technology, and Pharma for HealthLeaders.