University receives $1.5 million grant for workforce resiliency program
Waynesburg University has received a $1.5 million grant to be used to help reduce burnout and improve mental health for health-care professionals.
The three-year federal grant for $1,536,578 comes from the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) for the development of a Health Workforce Resiliency Plan.
The program is designed to enhance the resiliency, health and safety of health-care and similar professionals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and other long-term stressors. There will be a large range of regional organizations participating in the program, ranging from large hospital systems to smaller health care facilities and fire departments.
Dr. Michelle Steimer, assistant professor of counseling at Waynesburg University, explained that the grants were made available in August 2020. The recipients were announced in January.
“The grants were based upon, after COVID, creating a more resilient and healthier workforce for health-care workers and first responders who are just burned out,” said Steimer, who owns Steimer Counseling and Consulting in Washington. “The goal of this program is to have a healthy workforce so it’s ready to support the rest of our communities.”
Some $103 million in grants were awarded to 45 recipients. Waynesburg was one of only two institutions in Pennsylvania to receive grants. The other was the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine.
The university is partnering with community leaders, health-care organizations, first responders, and private practices to form a coalition that will collaborate to address health-care worker and first responder mental health and resiliency needs.
Once the announcement of the grant was made, calls and emails started coming into Waynesburg University from people interested in enrolling in the course, which Steimer believes to be the first of its kind. The plan is to launch the program in June.
“Part of this grant is to create a program that would be educational and sustainable to help this workforce basically recover and become more resilient in the future because there will always be some stressor in those professions,” Steimer said.
Steimer has a military background. She is a U.S. Army Reservist and has experience as a suicide prevention program manager for the U.S. Army Reserve in Pittsburgh.
“I missed being able to help these big organizations be proactive in being healthy,” Steimer said. “If you help somebody be stronger physically and mentally, they’re going to have a healthier family, they’re going to have a healthier community, they’re going to be healthier and live longer.”
The primary means of training will be through an online training series that introduces content in three tiers:
Tier 1
Foundational knowledge and skills regarding resiliency, suicide prevention, addictions, and burnout in the health-care workforce
Tier 2
A profession-specific training for nurses/physicians, counselors, and first responders
Tier 3
A Train-the-Trainer course for leaders and supervisors in identified health-care organizations.
One of the partners in the program is the Peters Township Volunteer Fire Department.
“The biggest thing is to avoid burnout,” said fire Chief Mike McLaughlin. “If staffing is limited, people can work a lot of hours and they can become burned out, especially in the COVID era, where we’re seeing work shortages with people being ill or exposed to someone being ill. We’re seeing employees having to work a lot of shifts. This can help them through the burnout phases.”
McLaughlin said he will take the course and hopes to have a lot of his crew members take it as well.
“We have career and volunteer firefighters, and these are things you see in the volunteer world as well,” McLaughlin said. “When volunteer firefighters are stressed out or overworked, you can see that same burnout in them. My job as an administrator is to make sure I don’t get burned out and to make sure I can recognize the signs for them and hopefully help them with that.”
Another partner in the program is the Washington Health System.
“Health-care fields are some of the most challenging to work in and historically have had high rates of burnout even prior to the COVID pandemic,” said Terry Wiltrout, president of Washington Health System Greene, vice president of operations, Washington Health System. “Since the start of the COVID pandemic, all health-care workers have had to demonstrate the power of resilience, more than ever before. It is important that after health-care workers have a stressful situation, they identify it and find the ability to overcome it or cope with it quickly. Today’s society expects our health-care workers to be resilient during times of crisis. We are happy that Waynesburg University will be preparing our future health-care providers for resiliency.”
Along with training for health-care workers, there will be one community resilience event per year. Although the training series will be conducted online, in-person community events will be held on main campus in Waynesburg, and guest speaker events will be held at the Southpointe campus in Canonsburg.
Curriculum is being established and support personnel is being hired.
“I’m so excited,” Steimer said. “For somebody who has worked in health care, to somebody who’s led soldiers to somebody who teaches counseling as my passion, the amount of people we can impact, and we can keep helping to serve others, while still being able to be healthy, what a gift to a person and those in their family that love them.”