Page 30 - White Plains Hospital Annual Report 2020-2021

CARING COMES FULL CIRCLE
When stress among staff members runs high, the Care Code team is there to help.
White Plains Hospital has always placed a premium on the physical and emotional wellbeing of its staff members. After all, how can caregivers provide optimum patient care if they aren’t being well cared for themselves? The
Hospital offers numerous programs centering on wellness, spiritual health, and stress management for employees. One innovative program, called Care Code, saw skyrocketing popularity this past year as the Hospital’s clinicians and frontline workers sought inspiration and relief in the face of the pandemic.
Aimed at giving employ-
ees a safe and welcoming
way to debrief and decom-
press, Care Code is an
interdisciplinary program involving participants from the Hospital’s Caregiver Support, Holistic Nursing, Pastoral Care, Healing Touch, and Vol- unteer Services departments, who provide staff members with healing services including medita- tion, prayer, guided imagery, breathing exercises, and aromatherapy.
The program, which launched in the summer of 2017, was steadily gaining popularity among staffers when COVID-19 hit in March 2020 and the need for support grew exponentially. “The Care Code
team had already gained trust from the staff and we were looked at as support, but when COVID hit, the intensity of their needs changed,” notes Care Code team member Laura Himmelstein, a clinical
social worker, certified healing practitioner, and the Coordinator of the Hospital’s Caregiver Support Program.
The Care Code team supplemented its regularly scheduled visits by providing on-demand requests for support, set up an employee hotline for immediate response and referrals, stationed themselves at entrances and exits during shift changes for added visibility, and added “hallway visits,” where staff members
would see the team with its cart and stop for a quick snack and/or debriefing. From March 2020 through May 2020, the team interacted with a record number of Care Code participants, providing 947 Care Codes in March; 1,974 in April; and 1,042 in May.
During the visits, frequent themes arose. “At the beginning, there was a lot of fear to work through,” recalls Rabbi Fredda Cohen, the Director of Pastoral Care and one of the founding members of Care Code. “Also, the moral distress of not being able to do enough for patients was very high.”
“While we could not change the reality we were all facing, we were able to be with staff members and share in the pain together.”
— TOYOKO YASUI, RN —
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WHITE PLAINS HOSPITAL