Summer Archives
Charlotte Meyers- NYU Langone Health |
This summer, I worked at NYU Langone Health in New York City to develop an enhanced bereavement program for nurses. NYU Langone Health is one of the country's most academic and prestigious hospitals, spanning four locations in New York and staffing roughly 9,000 nurses across the enterprise.
The Covid-19 Pandemic has shed light on nurses' physically and emotionally taxing jobs. Notably, nurses worked long shifts throughout thistime, treating ill and palliative patients while often simultaneously experiencing personal grief and loss. Hospitals have recently found the need for more significant intervention and resources for this population to enhance wellbeing and lower healthcare burnout rates. It was in the wake of this catastrophe that my project was born.
Throughout my eight-week experience, I worked in collaboration with the Department of Integrative Health and the Department of Nurse Resiliency to examine the current practices and resources offered to Nurses during bereavement leave and propose recommendations for enhanced protocol. I interviewed the population to uncover their need for 1. recognition of the loss and 2. readily available resources. Next, I ran the data to determine the breadth of this occurrence for the population across the enterprise and examined comparable organizations’ practices.
Ultimately, I garnered and outlined six recommendations for improvement and presented my findings to the hospital’s Human Resources team and Adult Bereavement Committee to actualize the plan. Before I finished my eight-week project, I developed the first draft of an enhanced policy that implements recommendations sustainably.
The work I completed this summer will serve as the basis for an enhanced
bereavement protocol that addresses the population's needs and aligns with the organization's goals and capabilities. Working with industry experts offered growth in research and data mining skills, and improved my communication and public speaking. I am proud that I could be a part of a wide-scale change affecting over 9,000 individuals, with the potential to scale to the entire hospital staff. I look forward to continuing to work with NYU Langone and participating in the project implementation throughout the fall semester.