Peace and relaxation don’t usually come to mind when visiting the dentist, but Kaiser Permanente dental teams in the Northwest are making that a reality by offering spa-like services for patients.

KP members can choose from an array of complimentary offerings that include heated blankets, pillows, and personal headphones. Started in 2013 by team members in the Glisan Dental Office, the amenities are a hit with patients. Even better, the team’s idea has spread to other KP dental offices in the Northwest region. Read the whole story on the Northwest InsideKP portal.

Fairy Mills, a pharmacy technician and member of UFCW Local 555, has worked for Kaiser Permanente for 29 years. Not long ago, however, there were days she left the Mt. Scott Pharmacy ready to cry, exhausted. Wait times were up and service scores had plummeted. She thought about retiring but decided to tough it out—and was voted in as the union co-lead for the department’s unit-based team.

About the same time, Linh Chau arrived as the new supervisor. He wasn’t sure what he’d stepped into. “It was the perfect storm,” he says. “The team was stressed out, members were unhappy, membership was up, and in the midst of it all, we were implementing a new software system.”

Pharmacies in the Northwest region were in a tough spot a year or so ago—and that was especially true for the Mt. Scott Pharmacy. Part of the Sunnyside campus, it’s the second busiest pharmacy in the region, seeing an average of 500 patients a day and filling nearly 1,000 prescriptions.

Although other regions had already made the transition to ePIMS, a software system that syncs up with KP HealthConnect®, the migration process hadn’t been easy.

“We had to reenergize the team,” Chau says.

Chau and Mills’ first strategy was to give staff members confidence that things would improve. The two co-leads began rounding, checking in with UBT members regularly and making sure everyone had a chance to offer suggestions for improvement— giving them the power to shape how things are done, one of the key elements for beating back burnout.

Part of a manager’s job is to look at the big picture—and job stress and burnout are usually part of the picture in health care. Operational leaders from two regions share their thoughts on keeping workplace energy and morale high.

Wendy Watson (Northwest)
Regional vice president, Professional, Clinical and Continuing Care Services 

There’s very little downtime in our work. We want to deliver great service, quality, affordability. The pace is fast, as our industry is changing rapidly. That can be a formula for stress. No one can do this work alone—we all need to support one another.

Build strong teams

High-performing unit-based teams are part of the solution. Solving even one problem at a time can help a team increase job satisfaction and get results, and that reduces stress. If you are leading teams you have to be very purposeful—making time with your team, creating space to talk and making our meeting time productive and solution-focused.

Some of our facilities have Living Room huddles, where people from all departments gather before the start of business, and one department presents a topic. It’s an opportunity to learn and build relationships across the facility. The more connected we are, the more we can support each other.

Make time for yourself

Running is my No. 1 antidote to stress. I try to run regularly—early in the morning before the workday, and longer on weekends. It’s my way to expend physical energy and feel mentally reenergized.

You have to make time for yourself, and that includes exercise. It’s not easy to do. But when you make exercise a priority, you create energy to be able to deal more effectively with stress.

Corwin Harper (Northern California)
Senior vice president, Area Manager, Napa-Solano

It’s hard to generalize about stress because everybody has a different stress meter. We all handle things differently. It’s an issue of work-life balance, and we’re in an industry where we all invest our personal energy, because health care is about caring for others.

People have to be aware of that and think about what they can do to manage their energy and stress levels. We should proactively manage things at work that sap energy and invest in things that raise our energy.

How do you help others?

As a leader, I have to be aware of what I can do to minimize energy-wasters and reduce job stress.

We talk about stress in our workplace safety conversations. I address it as part of leadership rounding. And rounding is not just checking the box. It’s focused on engaging with people about how they’re doing, letting them know you care, encouraging them to spend time with their families and calling out work-related issues that are barriers to performance.

We focus on creating a culture where we understand and respect one another.

Know yourself

I hate sitting all day long. I do core exercises at work in my spare moments. You have to know when to step away and recharge. I try to eat right, exercise, listen to music and pray. I’m still working on getting enough sleep.

Rounding for results

Rounding is a powerful tool for creating a culture where employees are free to speak. Having a short list of open-ended questions to ask each person on a regular basis makes it easier for staff members to raise concerns—and that, in turn, helps reduce stress levels.

On a warm fall afternoon, nearly 35 children are bouncing off the walls as they get ready to leave the classroom and head out to their elementary school’s garden. They’re all members of an after-school garden club and cooking class called Edible Olympic. It’s the brainchild of Maria Peyer, an oncology nurse and team co-lead at the Longview Kelso Medical Office in Kaiser Permanente’s Northwest region and her husband, elementary school teacher Michael Bixby.

The kids can barely contain their excitement as Bixby tries to calm them down so they can listen to the afternoon’s agenda.

“The sooner you settle down and be quiet, the quicker I can finish what I need to say and you can get outside,” he implores the class.

Quickly, the hubbub settles. Bixby goes over what needs to be done: plant blueberry bushes, dig a hole for a tree, and remove bamboo sticks. He also reviews the Garden Guidelines, which include listening with respect, walking (no running) in the garden, and asking for permission before picking anything. Then he asks, “Whose garden is it?” and gets a resounding and loud, “Ours!” as everyone heads outside to get to work.

The students attend Olympic Elementary School in Longview, Washington. They don’t have many advantages: More than 20 percent of the city’s population is below the federal poverty line, and 90 percent of the school’s students participate in the free or reduced-price lunch program. Many experience food insecurity regularly, not knowing if they’ll have enough—or any—food to eat.

Income-related health disparities

There are well-documented health disparities related to low income, and these kids are at risk. Edible Olympic is helping address that vulnerability, teaching the kids about healthy food and how to prepare it, laying the foundation for good eating habits that last a lifetime. It’s an example of how partnership principles expand naturally and necessarily into the community; the new 2015 National Agreement includes commitments to jointly work on improving the health of the communities we serve.

The Longview project grew out of a Kaiser Permanente adult cooking class recommended for oncology patients, one that focuses on a plant-based diet. Peyer says that after moving to Longview, she and her husband were struck by the limited resources available to the children in the community.

“We wanted to affect change as directly as possible,” says Peyer, an OFNHP/ONA member. “So we dove headfirst into Edible Olympic. We didn’t want to spend time in meetings, we just wanted to get in the dirt and the kitchen—and that’s what we did.”

She sought support from Thriving Schools, one of Kaiser Permanente’s Community Benefit programs. She forged partnerships with the school’s Parent-Teacher Organization and the Lower Columbia School Gardens, a nonprofit that helps schools create garden programs. Local stores donated money. High school students from Longview and Portland also are participating.

“The kids, their parents and the greater community have embraced the efforts and confirmed that our hunches were right,” Peyer says.  “Good, healthy, real food, prepared simply, with love and in community, can be life transforming.”

Members of the Oncology unit-based team are supporting the project, too, donating money and time; four KP employees help staff the cooking class.

“Volunteering in the community gives us at KP a chance to share our skills and our approach to supporting good health,” says Elizabeth Engberg, the Northwest’s Thriving Schools program manager. “It also helps us learn about our members—where they live, work, learn and play, because that’s a huge part of what affects their health. Schools are the best place to do this.”

Overwhelming participation

The program has had overwhelming and unexpected participation.

“The idea was that this project would launch with eight to 10 kids. We had 60 kids come to the information session,” Peyer says, which prompted an instant expansion from one to two sessions. The kids work in the garden on Thursday afternoons, and on Fridays, they walk across the field to the middle school, where they are able to use the home economics classroom for cooking class. The sessions run for five weeks and end with a celebration where the kids cook a complete meal and share with their friends and family.

The first session got under way last spring. A grassy patch of the school’s property was selected as the site for the garden, and the children got seeds started indoors. As weather allowed, the ground was prepared. While they waited for their seedlings to be ready to plant, the kids were introduced to kitchen safety and how to prepare the food they were just beginning to grow.

In the cooking class, kids have a healthy snack, then work in small groups to prepare the dish of the week. When the cooking is done, they gather together  and enjoy their meal. The kids leave with a bag of groceries so they can cook the meal at home.

“In some cases, this may be the healthiest meal the family may eat during the week,” Peyer says.

On that fall day out in the garden, the kids in the second session organized quickly after studying the garden map Bixby brought along for reference. They divided themselves into groups and got to work with shovels, buckets and plants to complete the day’s activities.

One of the choices they faced was whether to extend the blueberries to the fence or stop a few feet in to allow for a foot path. Several kids piped up with ideas. The decision got made after 11-year-old Christian Aguibar offered his opinion.

“We can grow more things if we don’t have a walkway,” Christian said, “so let’s not have one.”