Challenge
Supporting Mental Health in the Workplace: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the nation’s first hospital devoted exclusively to the care of children, prioritizes health and wellbeing for not only their patients but their more than 14,000 employees. Throughout the pandemic and a year of social unrest, CHOP’s employees—both remote and frontline workers—were faced with unprecedented circumstances while caring for their patients, their families and themselves.
With these responsibilities came incredible stress and anxiety, especially for frontline workers. Fear of exposing family members to COVID-19 left those members of their workforce nervous to return home after work and unruly protesting throughout the city created a sense of hesitation about commuting to work. With these challenges at the forefront of their day-to-day routine, CHOP knew they needed to do something to support the mental health of their employees.
“I wanted employees to know that they are not alone, and they will never be alone. “
Opportunity
Evolve and Improve Mental Health for Employees in All Roles
Mental health has always been recognized as a key component of CHOP’s employee wellbeing initiatives, but the pandemic and social unrest highlighted the need for a stronger approach. Once the implications of these events began to negatively affect their community, CHOP’s Manager of Wellbeing and Worklife Programs, Lauren Chestnut, partnered with leadership to issue an immediate response.
CHOP’s diverse employees, ranging from high school age to executive leaders to everything in between, faced a number of unique challenges during this time, making it more important than ever to provide a variety of choices to support them and their personal circumstances.
Understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to wellbeing and that providing personalized choices to her organization would maximize program enrollment and engagement, maintain high employee satisfaction and improve health outcomes, Chestnut turned to the capabilities of and her partnership with Personify Health.
“I saw high rates of self-reported anxiety, stress and signs and symptoms of depression— something wasn’t adding up. I realized that not all employees were aware of the benefits available to them. I knew I had to do something to show employees where to go for help.”
Solution
Generating Awareness and Personalizing Mental Health
Chestnut’s incredible passion, persistence and drive to offer her organization the best wellbeing solutions with personalized choices has been integral to supporting her employees’ mental health throughout the pandemic. She has made it her mission to cultivate a culture of wellbeing through open conversations, sharing personal experiences and promoting a safe and accepting environment to help destigmatize mental health in the workplace while providing a variety of supports for her employees to enable them to cope with their circumstances.
In addition to Chestnut regularly sharing resources and holding special events to increase awareness of the benefits available to the members of her organization, she implemented a number of programs that support holistic wellbeing, including social connectivity, mental health and physical health. These new initiatives gave employees the option to participate in any programs that are relevant to their unique conditions, needs, and interests at any given time.
CHOP leverages Personify Health’s Coaching solutions, both onsite and telephonic, and says that it has been their most popular offering during the pandemic. They saw an increase or almost 300 new members who signed up for Coaching compared to the prior quarter. According to Chestnut, employees feel this aspect of their wellbeing program is especially effective. The ability to make personal connections with coaches and gain individualized support is helping employees build long-lasting healthy habits that enable them to reach their goals.
Chestnut quickly found that the powerful combination of sharing personal experiences and providing employees with a variety of wellbeing programs “skyrocketed” utilization of these benefits and increased positive outcomes for her organization.
“Employees are able to quickly and easily access these benefits through the Personify Health app. They’re able to directly connect with a real person to get quick, in-the-moment support whenever they need it.”
Solution
Featured CHOP Wellbeing Programs
Chestnut leverages Personify Health to assist in the development, promotion and execution of her programs to reach and engage the entire organization regardless of role, shift time or location, making it possible for CHOP to get the support they need anytime and anywhere. The programs below are just a few of the initiatives Chestnut has launched successfully, garnering high engagement rates throughout the organization.
Results
Cultivating Culture and Increasing Engagement with Benefits
As a result of the diverse mental health tools and resources created and shared by Chestnut and the CHOP leadership team, there has been a noticeable increase in the culture of wellbeing, connectivity and utilization of benefits throughout their organization.
These efforts to increase employees’ awareness of available benefits have proven successful:
Connect with a wellbeing expert to learn how your organization can boost workplace culture and increase utilization of employee benefits with a unified, personalized Homebase for Health®.