Warning: Labels could be a source of growing pains

WINCHESTER – From the outside, Winchester District Memorial Hospital appears to be a shining example of a state of the art community hospital ready to position itself as a regional centre for health care, but what’s on the inside matters too.

Realizing this, Hospital CEO Trudy Reid and the board have taken steps to ensure that the heart of the hospital, its 178 employees, are also industry leaders.

They want WDMH staff to lead health care in bucking the trend of workplace employee stress that runs rampant throughout the industry today.

“Now that everything’s built, what we need is to invest in our people,” said Reid at a Feb. 18 press conference.

Reid explained that rather than react to the province-wide trends, this hospital decided to invest first in finding out exactly what issues are impacting staff at this rural, community hospital.

“We wanted to use a research methodology and use data as a tool,” said Reid.

For this project they went to Dr. Linda Duxbury, a research pioneer in the field of organizational health, with extensive experience in the area of managing a changing workforce.

Duxbury, who recently completed a similar study for a group of four Ottawa Hospitals, got involved with the WDMH staff satisfaction and wellness study because it provides a great opportunity and environment to gather longitudinal data relevant to the health care industry.

WDMH was able to get the expertise of Duxbury at less than one-tenth of the cost usually affixed to such a project.

The $8,000 spent by WDMH on the study covered the expenses of PhD candidate Laura Gover who conducted the interviews through which data was gathered. The money was part of an education reserve in the hospital budget.

“Clearly there has been a lot of change in health care over the last five years and it won’t stop,” said Gover who sees this research as an opportunity to gather data on how all of these changes are impacting people.

In the spring of 2009, 83 staff members responded to a confidential survey, and then through the summer and fall, 59 staff members took part in one-on-one, in-depth interviews, where key indicators such as community, work environment and the affects of change were examined.

Specific details of the study, being used as an internal tool to improve the WDMH employee environment, were not released to the public in order to maintain staff privacy. But, Reid and Druxbury did discuss some of the general findings in a broader sense.

Not surprisingly, WDMH employee survey results were very similar to those found in Ottawa hospitals and nationwide, with a more than half of those surveyed reporting feelings of stress, feelings of being overwhelmed, feelings of being burned out, feelings of role overload, and higher levels of depression.

Although the results were much like what Druxbury has seen before, she did find that there is one phenomenon unique to WDMH that could be quite problematic.

She explained that there is a very real division among the people who work at the hospital. That dividing line is based on individual perceptions about people being ‘from here’ or ‘not from here’.

“I have never seen this before,” said Druxbury.

“This environment is not particularly welcoming to newcomers,” and she warns that the community should be alarmed at this finding.

Recruiting health care workers is already difficult. “The hospital needs to get people to come and work here and the community needs to get people to come and work here,” she said. She further explained that labelling people as ‘newcomers’ could make the already difficult task of recruiting, even more difficult. She sees labelling people as newcomers, a huge challenge for this community and hospital. “People don’t like being labelled.”

The plan for the findings gathered is to use them, over the next two years to implement solutions and measure their effects on staff morale.

Some of the recommended solutions may include increased social opportunities between management and staff, providing much more support and focus on the managers, the group reporting the highest levels of stress and overload, and improving team work, which is essential in the health care environment.

In addition to further work at WDMH, the five eastern counties hospitals, are hoping to conduct similar staff satisfaction and wellness studies.

Applications to fund continued research have been submitted.

“We know that continued success in health care delivery requires a healthy workplace,” concluded Reid. “Advancing culture is hard work and requires choice and investment by everyone. We will work together to ensure WDMH’s role as a regional health care leader committed to providing the best care for patients and families in our communities.”