Transcription:

Gina: Welcome to the Iowa Specialty Hospitals and Clinics' ISH Dish Podcast, practical health advice from Iowa specialty experts. We want to connect the members of our communities with the latest healthcare information that's understandable, relatable, and useful to your daily life.

I am so excited for this guest today. We are going to talk all things wellness related to your physical health, your emotional health, maybe your spiritual, financial, social. Wellness is so encompassing in the entire body and soul. It's just incredible.

So with me today, I have Brooke Nerlien, and Brooke has been an RN for 11 years and is our wellness coach for Iowa Specialty Hospital. Welcome to the show.

Brooke Nerlien: Thank you for having me, Gina. Happy to be here.

Gina: Absolutely. This topic excites me. I tried out to be a personal trainer once upon a time in my life.

Brooke Nerlien: Fun fact.

Gina: Yeah. And I decided halfway through it that this wasn't for me, because if I tell you what to do and you don't do it, I'm going to get really mad. So, we abandoned that dream. So, I am excited for you in this position, and I think it's really cool. So, you're like, what, a certified wellness coach? I mean, you went to--

Brooke Nerlien: Yeah. So, I am a certified wellness coach. I went and did my training through Mayo Clinic. It was a 12-week online intense program. I did the training back in 2021. It was still pandemic learning and so it was all virtual, but we did hardcore coaching sessions over the telephone, video chatting coaching sessions. So yeah, it was a 12-week intense program where I was able to get real life experience

Gina: Do you also get coached?

Brooke Nerlien: Yes. I was a coach and a client. So, I got to sit in the hot seat and feel what it is like getting coached and learn what coaching strategies worked for me, what I didn't like feeling, what words helped me, and maybe things that weren't so helpful. So, it was a good, well-rounded program where you got to sit on both sides of the table.

Gina: That's so cool. Do you feel like there's a stigma behind the word coaching? Did they talk about that at all? I feel like sometimes, you know, like, I'm going to go get a trainer, or I'm going to get a coach.

Brooke Nerlien: Yeah, that's a good question because sometimes there is that stigma associated with needing a health coach because then it has that negative annotation that you're failing if that makes sense, that you need help. But really, I don't want people to have that barrier in front of them. We all want to do better. We all can do better in every aspect of our life. Whether it's being a better parent, a better member in your faith, a better runner, or whatever it may be, we all are always searching for ways to be better. So, I think it's awesome that our employees have this tool, me, at their fingertips to be able to use, and I don't want that negative stigma associated with reaching out to me.

Gina: Yeah. And there's a certain amount of accountability then that goes along with it.

Brooke Nerlien: Yes. So, that's kind of what I am there for. I do hold the employees accountable. They are in the driver's seat. Just like in any other coaching scenario, the coach isn't out there playing for them, and I'm not out there playing for the employees either. I use motivational interviewing, so I find what drives them, what's important to our employees, and we work on goals, and I help set goals. I help really focus on is that realistic? How likely are you to do that? Why do you have that goal? And then, the follow through, the accountability. And every employee's a little bit different. Sometimes they want that weekly accountability. it might be every two weeks. Maybe it's once a month. Maybe it's a phone call, maybe it's a Zoom. The format looks different for everybody.

Gina: It's so nice, yeah. So, let's back up a little bit then. And so, you haven't always done this obviously, right? How did that decision come about to transfer what you were doing before into "Now, I'm a wellness coach"? Like how did administration get involved in that? I'm kind of thinking from a recruitment standpoint also, if we have people out there who are looking for a job, you know, everybody has openings now and we're no exception. This is another little, I don't want to say like notch in our belt, a true way to show that we really do care about our staff.

Brooke Nerlien: You nailed it. Our administration team is so supportive of the wellbeing of our employees, both professionally and personally. Our leadership team cares about each person, and we know that a healthy employee does better work and they do better in their personal life. If I'm healthy, I can be a better employee, I can be a better mom, I can be a better significant other, whatever that might be. And the wellness position was really driven by our leadership, and I think that is so amazing that they prioritize the employees as a whole.

So yeah, this position, like you said, I was a registered nurse prior to becoming this wellness coach role. And if I take it a step past that, I was a teacher in my previous life. And so, my love of teaching and helping and then my love of all things medical and putting pieces together and loving the science the medical field, those two things combined. I knew that this was going to be the right fit for me, where I can still wear a little bit of my clinical nursing hat, but then I can do some teaching and education as well.

So, that's kind of how this position came to be about or why I applied for it. Like I said, I love helping others and the leadership team, the administration team really cares, and that's perfect. It's a great place to work when you know you're cared about so deeply on that level, both professionally and personally. We care about how are you doing financially. Financial health is huge. Mental health is huge. How are you doing mentally at home? How are these stressors affecting you? How did you do through the COVID pandemic and so on and so forth? And ISH really does care about the whole person as the employee.

Gina: That is really cool because the word that came to my mind when you were talking about all of this was stress. I probably go home four nights a week and tell my husband, "I am just stressed out." And I know he gets tired of hearing about that. But truly, that's the world we live in.

Brooke Nerlien: It is.

Gina: I mean, I'm no exception, it happens to all of us. And finding ways to handle that stress because it's never going to go away. But becoming more of a healthy person just leads to all of that. Lowering your stress and blood pressure, you know, it all goes hand in hand. I've got a list here in front of me about holistic wellness. And some of the things I mentioned early on in the podcast, like your physical wellness, emotional, just talk a little bit about these things.

Brooke Nerlien: Sure. So, holistic wellness, again, it's looking at the employee as a whole. There's a big umbrella of wellness and there's lots of pieces to it. We can't put all of our eggs in one basket and just focus on our physical health and let our mental health, our social health, our financial health fall to the bottom. So, we like to be well-rounded and prioritize all of those things. So, physical health, moving, being active, our employees are encouraged to track their steps and participate in challenges. And then in return, we have some cash discounts on their monthly health insurance premiums or a cash prize at the end of the year.

The emotional health is something else that's huge with the stress and everything like that. So, we focus on that. Iowa Specialty Hospital is a registered work site for the Make It Okay Program. It is a campaign that is to end stigma surrounding mental health. And if anyone hasn't listened to one of your previous podcasts with Alexis Morgan, that was great and you guys addressed the stigma with that. So, we support that in our workplace. We know it's okay to not be okay and our leadership team is trained on being able to have those caring conversations with employees and/or patients if they are going through a hard time.

Our social health is another thing that falls under holistic wellness. Just making sure that we are having good relations either with our coworkers or on our home life or outside. And our organization does a great job of offering team building events and team building within the department and then within the organization and then even across all of our locations. We do lots of organizational-wide events to bring people together.

Gina: Yeah. And that's not an easy feat anymore with all the locations that we have.

Brooke Nerlien: Right. Yes. And then, financial health is super important. And the pandemic has increased financial burdens, and we recognize that. And so, we have a lot of awesome things just right here on at our fingertips. We have an employee assistance program that offers budget counseling. We have scholarships programs. We have a employee hardship fund that if our employees have something unexpected financially come up, they can apply for some temporary funds to help get them through those tough times. And again, we offer discounted health premiums as an incentive for being active and being healthy. And so, we do lots of different things.

And one of the other parts of holistic wellness is intellectual wellness, and just always wanting to learn and grow, and we do a great job of that I feel as well. Just offering the professional development opportunities and cross-training and job shadowing and scholarships to go back to be a nurse or a paramedic. Just always fostering professional development is huge and that's a part of wellness that we don't always think about, is our brain. And so, that's something to think about too. So, all of those pieces make up wellness.

Gina: Yes, it's a lot.

Brooke Nerlien: It's a lot because most people equate wellness with what I put in my mouth or the fact that I'm not moving enough. And that is an important part, but if we invest all of our time and efforts into exercising, we might lose out on other opportunities to grow our brains and our bank accounts and things like that. So, we really tried to keep all of those pieces in balance.

Gina: You know, another thing I think about too, I feel like sometimes it's easy to forget to have fun.

Brooke Nerlien: Yes.

Gina: It's sounds crazy, but I've noticed that with myself. My husband and I had friends over last night, just for example. And we laughed and laughed about nonsense, just silly things, you know, and told stories and it was so fun. I was exhausted. I got to bed way too late, but I had so much fun and I was like, "Wow, I needed that."

Brooke Nerlien: And they say laughter is the best medicine. And now, you know why. Yeah, that just kind of filled that social wellness bucket yours that you might not have known that you were emptying.

Gina: Yeah. And I want to make a note too when you were talking about the employee hardship fund, I think one of the coolest things about that is that, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like most of those funds come from our own employees. We do events throughout the year, bake sales, jeans on Fridays. We have to pay $5 for the privilege of wearing jeans on Fridays, and then all of that money goes to the hardship fund.

Brooke Nerlien: Yep. You nailed it, Gina. Yeah, most of the funds are donated by our own employees. Our generous auxiliary clubs too also donate to that. But it is really cool to think I'm helping an employee in need and it's completely anonymous. When you need the funds, it is anonymous.

Gina: Nobody knows that you're doing it or you're getting them.

Brooke Nerlien: No. But yeah, it is cool that we do do these fundraisers. And it's a hundred percent helping one another.

Gina: Yeah. For me personally, it's more motivating to actually participate in those things, because I know we're helping on a super local level. I mean, right here in our own--

Brooke Nerlien: Our own four walls.

Gina: Exactly. Yeah. Wellness Wednesday. This has been going on a while, hasn't it?

Brooke Nerlien: Yeah. I want to say it probably started last summer. So, Wellness Wednesday is an initiative that was brought up through the wellness committee. So, I also had a wellness committee. We actually just met today. We meet once a month and it is a group of people from across the different specialties. We have mental health represented, our dieticians, physical therapy, financial, a little bit of everybody represented, marketing. This group of us that are passionate about wellness and wellness initiatives. So, Wellness Wednesday, the second Wednesday of every month, our employees have the opportunity at our cafeterias to try something that maybe they wouldn't have normally tried.

Gina: I'm putting my nose up because I'm the worst at this.

Brooke Nerlien: And we limit our other offerings. So, you're kind of forced to have this wellness meal, which is kind of fun. For example, Thanksgiving time, we did a healthy version of a Thanksgiving dinner. So, instead of mashed potatoes, we had cauliflower mashed potatoes. Now, I don't think there's too many of us out there that are going to volunteer just to try those out at home. But when you presented them, it's love it, hate it, but hey, you tried it. You had the opportunity to try something new. There's usually some education that goes along with that too for the day or for the month. And then, it was so successful that we have started delivering Wellness Wednesday meals across all of our campuses. We have a little team that will deliver to those employees offsite on those special wednesdays.

Gina: I found out during one of these wellness-- I think it was years ago actually. We were doing the red light, green light, yellow light foods. And I thought, "Okay, this is my opportunity to try brussel sprouts." And that was a hard no.

Brooke Nerlien: But you tried it.

Gina: I did.

Brooke Nerlien: You could have loved it. And our salad bar too. The public is in on the Wellness Wednesday meals too. Because if they come visit our cafeteria, that's what we're serving, that's what the community members get. So, it's awesome it does extend past our structure. But our salad bar has red, green, and yellow ladels. So of course, our delicious ranch dressing is a red ladle. But we have other things that are yellows and greens. And so, it's just bringing that awareness to the employees. We have over 700 employees, but not all of us are doctors and nurses. So this health information, we are a healthcare facility, but a lot of our employees are non-clinical. So knowing this is a red food, this is a green food, "Oh, that makes sense." It's so fun to educate the employees on simple health things that are good to know.

Gina: So, education is a huge piece. And as another example, I worked from home during this last round of bad weather and I had purchased a bag of chicken nuggets that were lightly breaded and full of protein, more of your healthy version. And I thought, just for fun, I'm going to actually weigh a serving. It was alarming.

Brooke Nerlien: I bet it was alarming, very eyeopening.

Gina: It's probably a third of what I would normally eat. I actually put them in the oven. And I thought, "That's kind of a waste of time because it was like five nuggets. You know, I said to Denny, I said, "It's no wonder we struggle."

Brooke Nerlien: Yeah. Because we don't know unless we take the time to educate ourselves. And that is, we do teach things about portion sizes. And just this last month, we talked about what the color of our urine means. Did you see those signs? Well, I know your team helped make all those laminated signs and they went in all of our public bathrooms organizational-wide at all of our campuses. So whether you were an employee or you were a patient or a visitor, I'm sure you saw those signs to look at the color of your urine to tell you your hydration status. It's little things like that that make a big difference. And if we can get one person to say, " Aha. I didn't know that. I'm going to make a better choice. Next time, I'm going to drink more water," then we are succeeding. That's one little thing at a time.

Gina: Yes. And here it is, we're at the end of February. And of course, all the resolutions started on the 1st of January. And I think a lot of people, you know, this has been almost two months now and it's easy to drop off and just quit.

Brooke Nerlien: It is, and we do.

Gina: Yes. "I'll just start again in March. It's fine." Also, let's see, did you guys remove the pop too?

Brooke Nerlien: Oh, yes. We got rid of our fountain machine.

Gina: Was there mutiny?

Brooke Nerlien: No. Actually, more excitement. Like finally, we're getting this.

Gina: Because we got a really cool replacement.

Brooke Nerlien: Yes. So both of our campuses have a flavored water machine. And what I love about it is that you can customize your flavors. There's six different flavors, anything from cucumber to mint to strawberry, lemon grass, all sorts of yummy flavors. But you can add in caffeine. Now, I know from a wellness perspective, there's pros and cons, mostly cons to caffeine, right? But if you were someone that was missing the caffeine from that soda machine, you can still get your caffeine. You can add in vitamin C and some different immunity enhancers to your water. You can add some bubbly to it, so it's sparkling. And they're all less than five calories. So, yeah, we're doing little things like that. Again, our coffee is free, our flavored water is free, both for the employees and the guests, the patients. And we are revamping our vending machines a little bit too, to be able to offer a little more healthier items while you are with us. We want to model the behaviors that we are teaching.

Gina: Amazing.

Brooke Nerlien: Yeah.

Gina: Just love it.

Brooke Nerlien: Yes, it's great. It's fun. Learning is lifelong. There's always new information developing regarding health, and you know how it goes. There's always a new diet or a new medication or a new way of doing things, and keeping on top of it can be a challenge and getting that information out. So, it's just biting off little chunks and getting that information out to the public and to the employees. That's what's going to make a difference.

Gina: And you do that, you do a really good job of that. I mean, you've got an article in our weekly newsletter. And you do that weekly, right? A wellness, what do we call it?

Brooke Nerlien: The Wellness Watch. So, each month I have a theme. So like this past month, it's February currently. It's American Heart Month. So, our theme was "Be Heart Smart." So, each one of those articles for the week was something related to heart health. Limiting salt and offering a sodium tracker for a day. How to check your pulse. What does your pulse rate mean? What's your pulse number supposed to be? Things like that. And so, I do those weekly.

Next month, looking into March, we are going to focus on sleep and how important that is, especially with daylight savings coming up. So, our theme will be "Be Rested." and we're going to talk about sleep apnea and talk about sleep services that we have right here at Iowa Specialty Hospital, right at our employee's fingertips. So, we're going to be talking about that and how to restore our sleep after daylight savings time. So, each week, there will be a little bit of different information in our employee's newsletter about sleep hygiene and how to improve our sleep. And so, it's at that level and then at the department level, our leaders also have a wellness agenda item that they talk about at the department level that I give them information to share with their staff. So, it's in multiple places, which just goes to show you how important our organization does prioritize wellness.

Gina: Yep. And I know that even things like, in our little team here, marketing and communications, we do stretch breaks.

Brooke Nerlien: That's great.

Gina: You know, stand up for a while and work, sit down and do the things, walk around when it's nicer out, twirl around the house a few times, just whatever. It's amazing just how better you feel when you start to pay attention these things.

Brooke Nerlien: Move. One of the new trends that you'll see and you'll hear is walking meetings. So whether you're on a phone call, taking a phone call, walk, maybe you're doing a one-on-one meeting with someone. And if it's nice out, not here in Iowa weather in February, but go for a walk. So, walking meetings are huge, walking lunches are huge. Those are becoming some of the trends. You'll see a lot of the exercise stability balls in place of your chair. And now, they have those walking pads and the bicycle chairs, the sit-to-stand desks. So, we're getting really good at being creative and we know how important it is to move throughout the work day.

Gina: I've actually even looked into-- one of our coworkers has the little--

Brooke Nerlien: The pedal?

Gina: Yeah, bike under your desk.

Brooke Nerlien: Yes. There's what they call like these little surfboards, balance boards, where you can stand on this surfboard-looking thing. It's got a ball under it.

Gina: Yeah. I've even seen the thing under the desk.

Brooke Nerlien: Yep. The walking pads. Yep. So, wellness is a growing market and I am so thankful that we are on board and almost kind of ahead of the curve with that. And again, our administration team is very focused.

Gina: Well, I can tell you on my own behalf and on behalf of everybody, we are so thankful that you are here doing it

Brooke Nerlien: Oh, thank you.

Gina: It does. It makes a huge difference. And you can tell. It hits everybody somewhere along that list, you know, so...

Brooke Nerlien: Thank you. I enjoy what I do, so it helps.

Gina: It shows. That's awesome. Well, thank you very much, Brooke, for being a guest. I think you need to come back again so we could talk more. There's so many things.

Brooke Nerlien: There are so many things and maybe, yeah, if you get some feedback from your audience of maybe some specific topics that they'd like to talk about, I might just come back.

Gina: Absolutely. We'd love to have you.

Thank you for listening to Iowa's Specialty Hospitals and Clinics' ISH Dish Podcast.

For more information on the topics we discussed today, visit us on the web at iowaspecialtyhospital.com. There, you can read a transcript of today's episode or previously aired episodes, as well as get the latest news from Iowa's Specialty Hospitals and Clinics, and explore all of the services that we offer. For the ISH Dish Podcast, I'm Gina. Thanks for tuning in.