MINDFULNESS & WELLNESS
Stress-cutting sessions one of the latest workplace perks.
The startling data about a rise in stress felt by workers at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare first surfaced last year.
From 9 percent who reported stress and anxiety in 2014, the percentage shot up to 45 percent last year who said they felt varying levels of stress, said Jane Van Deren, Methodist’s wellness manager.
The director of the Memphis-based health care system’s employee assistance program confirmed the trend. More and more of some 12,000 workers were saying they were not only stressed, but might be a little bit or even a lot depressed, Deren said.
“We haven’t been able to identify why that’s going up,” she said. “Maybe people got more comfortable with the assessment tool and they were willing to tell the truth, or maybe it really did rise. We don’t know, but we did know we need to offer more programming around stress.”
One of those programs is mindfulnessbased stress reduction. It had instructor Michael Burnham speaking in soothing tones as he asked the latest class of volunteers to raise their shoulders to their ears, inhale through their nostrils and exhale through their mouths.
“What we are trying to cultivate is the ability to be present in the moment, on purpose, without judgment,” said Burnham, trained at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, home to the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society.
At a cost of about $400 per worker, and now open to Methodist patients and families as well, the eight-week mindfulness course is the kind of benefit that has won Methodist notice as a health care employer.
“If you think about it, one trip to the ER because you’re super stressed out and think you’re having a heart attack — a lot more
than $400,” Deren said.
Great Places to Work, based on employee surveys, made Methodist No. 8 on its 2016 list of 20 Best Workplaces in Health Care throughout the nation. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is No. 7. Becker’s Hospital Review included Methodist on its 2016 list of 150 Great Places to Work in Healthcare for a second consecutive year. Becker’s also recognized St. Jude.
Burnham, who said he also instructs at St. Jude, called mindfulness-based stress reduction the most widely researched mindbody medicine around. In March, for example, the National Institutes of Health highlighted a study that it can relieve chronic lower back pain.
Keeping employees, or associates as they are called at Methodist, engaged and liking what they do leads to better care of patients and families, Deren said.
Burnham said that mindfulness can apply across any business setting because most workplaces have a great deal of stress.
“We cannot change what the world offers us,” he said. “We can change how we respond and we can go from being overwhelmed to understanding what is required in the situation and dealing with it in a much calmer, different, more productive way.”