HJAR Mar/Apr 2022

DIALOGUE that it continues to weaken. That is, in fact, what we believe has happened at a popu- lation level. That doesn’t help if you’re the one out of so many thousands that ends up in the hospital, even with Omicron, but at a population level, having a more widespread, less lethal virus is how you ultimately get to some kind of community-wide or herd immunity. What I hope is happening with Omicron is any strains that followwill con- tinue to weaken. Coronaviruses have been around a long time. COVID-19 may continue to be around a long time with different variants. Our expectation, and hope, is that this will con- tinue to become less and less lethal — more like a common cold, or a seasonal flu, not to diminish or minimize the damage that a bad seasonal flu can cause. But, we hope that it becomes something that obviously we can live with on an ongoing basis and that we can adapt to. Editor You spoke about mental health a moment ago, and COVID has pushed many of us to unhealthy limits. Your team has been on the forefront for two years now. How is Baptist dealing with the mental health burnout and trauma of staff who we all desperately need? Wells Since we all started down this path in 2020 with preparing for COVID and dealing with COVID inmultiple ways, we have really focused on howwe make sure the resources our employees need are available to them, particularly when it comes to their mental health and well-being. We’ve provided those resources and promoted those resources and made them available. We didn’t want availability to be the problem. If somebody doesn’t want to get help, they may not want to get help, and we can’t force somebody to. We didn’t want to make access an issue, so we made sure to provide that. One of the things that you worry about sometimes, and maybe it’s just me, is some- times we can talk ourselves into problems. I think it’s important how we talk about this — that we don’t create a situation where people all of a sudden, because everyone is telling them they should be depressed, that they get depressed. It really is important to focus on how we holistically care for our- selves and each other and to be careful to not let headlines and the news start to make us believe there’s a problem that may not really be as bad as they would make you think it is. I only say all that to say howwe talk about it, how we communicate about it is impor- tant. We really should think about all of a person’s needs. There’s mental health, there’s spiritual health, physical health and finan- cial health. All those things are so impor- tant. In fact, if one of those is too far out of whack, it creates a mental health problem in many cases. So, I think that there are a lot of things that we can do besides provide interventional mental health services that can prevent a deterioration in terms of men- tal health in our workforce. We have to be really focused on all those other aspects of what people need to survive and thrive and do well and be well so that we don’t create more mental health problems. We also have to make sure that people take adequate time off for themselves and don’t get burned out from working too much. Multiple times along the way, we’ve kept traveling staff around longer just so our permanent staff could take the time off that they had earned and didn’t feel pressure to keep on working because they knew we’d be short without them. Editor How is Baptist Health managing the shortage of staff and building a larger pipeline for healthcare workers? Wells Well, let me talk about the pipeline first. We actually have a college. I don’t know if you knew that. Our Baptist Health College has a nursing program and about six or seven other allied health degree pro- grams and has been absolutely essential for our health system over the many, many decades. Our nursing college began when Baptist Health started 100 years ago. It’s one of the larger, if not the largest, hospi- tal-based nursing programs in the United States. We provide nurses for a whole lot of people; we don’t hire all of them. We train them — they end up getting great clinical training, great classroom training — and they go and work for people across the state, across the country. We think that’s a really valuable asset and has enhanced the ability for Arkansas to grow and develop nurses. So, that’s just been critical. Thinking forward about pipeline, we have been very active in trying to determine how we can best grow those programs, particu- larly the nursing program, going forward, knowing that these are longer-term solu- tions. They’re not short-term; this doesn’t help us in 12 months. It helps us in 24, 36, 48 months. But, that’s certainly part of our strategy to deal with that pipeline you’re talking about. Now, part of the other challenge is it’s not necessarily one of these things that if you build it, they will come. You’ve got to find not just the pipeline of nursing students, but it’s the people who are going to go into nurs- ing school. Somebody has to make an active choice at some point in life before they get into something else. We’ve got to start attracting people to the healthcare indus- try sooner, perhaps, than what we’re used to doing, and to be more actively participating in drawing people into the healthcare work- force. We’re not just going out to nursing schools trying to recruit nursing students anymore; we’re trying to recruit high school students to go into the nursing profession. The point of that is you’ve got to make sure that your pipeline of applicants is the kind of people with the skills and basics that are going to allow them to develop into a quality nurse. Not just anybody can show up and become a nurse. There’s more to it than that, as you know, and we’ve got to make sure that our pipeline into the nurse pro- grams, whether it be ours or others’, is filled with people of high quality that are going to be able to be successful and provide good 12 MAR / APR 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS