Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Receives New HRSA Grant to Promote Well-Being and Enhance Resiliency Among Health Care Workers
$2.1 million grant will fund a new training initiative to reduce mental health burden associated with health care and the COVID-19 pandemic
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has been awarded a three-year, $2.1 million Health Workforce Resiliency grant from the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) to develop a new training initiative that will promote well-being, enhance resilience, and aim to reduce the burden of mental health conditions, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation among the health professional workforce.
The grant will fund the development, implementation, and staffing of CARE (Culture, Access, Resilience, Education): Enhancing Resilience and Mental Health in the Mount Sinai Health Care Workforce Through Training, Access to Care and Culture Transformation. A collaboration between Mount Sinai’s Office of Well-Being and Resilience and the Center for Stress, Resilience, and Personal Growth, this undertaking will deliver innovative team-based training interventions supported by system-level, structural initiatives that promote a culture of well-being and workplace efficiency. The grant will also expand behavioral health care screening and treatment programs offered through the Center.
“Mount Sinai’s workforce, in particular our front-line care workers, have long experienced the significant mental health burden associated with working in a health care environment—a burden that has been exacerbated over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine, Medical Education, and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Dean for Well-Being and Resilience, and Chief Wellness Officer at Icahn Mount Sinai.
“Although Mount Sinai has been a leader in responding to the psychosocial needs of our workforce, the breadth and reach of our efforts pale in comparison with the increased burden that our vast and diverse workforce is facing, and will continue to face, in light of the pandemic. This grant recognizes our pioneering work in this space, but more importantly, it provides us with timely, vital support to ramp up our mental health efforts, particularly among our emergency departments and intensive care units, where the impact of the pandemic has been acute.”
CARE has two educational training components. One, “Targeted Onsite Resilience and Mental Health Training,” will initially focus on engaging and building resilience among health care workers in high-need patient care units, where the risk of burnout and other mental health symptoms is high, before being rolled out to the entire Mount Sinai workforce. The other component, “Leadership Training in Well-being Culture and Practice Efficiency,” will enable unit leaders to develop the skills and demonstrate the behaviors necessary to foster a workplace culture that continually promotes well-being and resilience and nurtures mental and emotional health. Training will be paired with two system-level well-being support intervention components: an enhanced mental health screening, referral, and treatment program, and a Health System well-being culture communications initiative. Interventions will include resiliency huddles for Mount Sinai’s emergency department and intensive care unit teams and expanded access to behavioral health care services.
“There are many contributors to burnout and adverse mental health in the health care setting, necessitating a coordinated, multipronged approach to achieve a significant, lasting impact in reducing that burden,” said Jonathan DePierro, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai and Clinical and Research Director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth. “Through CARE, we are taking a strategic, comprehensive approach to mental wellness that will raise awareness, destigmatize supports, provide training, and contribute to structural change at all levels so that we can maximize our impact and provide ongoing support for our entire workforce.”
Development of the CARE program and supporting curricula is underway and the grant will facilitate the recruitment of staff to coordinate these efforts, deliver training, and provide expanded behavioral health care services. “The project goals are to pilot these programs, determine what works, refine the curricula, and create a sustainability plan to ensure that these programs remain fully accessible to faculty and staff long after the grant period,” said Lauren Peccoralo, MD, MPH, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Well-Being and Development, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai. “As we build out and refine these programs, curricula, and processes, we can achieve better outcomes for our workforce in terms of their well-being and for our patients in terms of enhanced care.”
“We also intend to share the models we develop and the insights we gain with other health care centers in keeping with the reporting requirements of HRSA but also with our mission as an academic center,” added Dr. Ripp. “In doing so, we hope to advance the field’s ability to address well-being and mental health issues, so the result of our efforts could be multiplicative.”
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. Its comprehensive system includes seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing. Together, the Health System comprises approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York by Newsweek and No. 5 on the magazine’s World’s Best Hospitals list. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools for National Institutes of Health funding, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.