Wellness team

Carol Petersen, Laurel Kirchner

The wellness team has been nimble, flexible and responsive as Covenant Health remains committed to health and wellness as a priority. Ongoing exceptional circumstances have intensified the need for a breadth of wellness resources, education and formats to reach employees – frontline clinical, integrated or facility support—and leadership in a mindful and time-sensitive manner. Laurel Kirchner and Carol Petersen have been empathetic to the ongoing moral distress and exhaustion felt across the organization, and providing resources to build personal and team wellness toolkits.

Recognizing that different teams have varied needs, the wellness team reaches out to site wellness partners to identify what would be of most value to each team. Laurel and Carol strive to bring new and innovative wellness resources to Covenant Health in a way that is both efficient and practical. When the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way teams worked, Laurel and Carol created a virtual course on building resilience and offered it over Zoom to accommodate individuals on virtual platforms. Using the online platform challenged prior paradigms for information delivery but they excelled at exploring the opportunities virtual forums provide to engage broadly with teams in a timely manner.

The wellness team demonstrates a strong desire to find and engage with evidence-based knowledge to enhance their work. Laurel and Carol share new wellness tips and strategies based on science and best practice weekly at town halls, site management meetings and other venues. They openly share stories of their own personal struggles and discoveries to model how they have adapted wellness practices into their own lives. This is evident during weekly rural integration meetings when equipping rural operational leaders with practical wellness tools to support their teams. It has often been said they provide just the right tools needed at just the right time.