Methodist Dallas Hospital Helps Their Own Get Healthy
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DALLAS (CBS 11 NEWS) - The nation's nurses spend their days—and nights—managing the consequences of poor health choices. So it may come as some surprise that many are making some poor choices of their own.
"Nursing is an exhausting profession," says Jamie Brennan, a nurse at Methodist Dallas Medical Center. "We're running and taking care of everybody else and we forget to take care of our self."
And the statistics seem to agree. According to researchers at the University of Maryland, some 55% of the nation's nurses or overweight or obese—citing stress, and the hectic pace as some of the reasons that it's so hard to focus on their own health.
"It's hard for nurses to plan ahead and make sure that they eat healthy that day," says Brennan. "They eat whatever is there when they're running by. So if something's unhealthy, that's what they're going to eat that day."
But, Brennan's hospital system is taking steps to encourage their employees to take better care of themselves: even if it does at times look a little weird.
"I did get a strange look a couple of times," says Methodist Dallas in house counsel Crystal Moore, "I just encouraged them to join in.
Brennan has been a nurse for some 10 years and says in the hectic pace of the day, it's easy to skip even the simplest things—like drinking water.
"Nurses during the day don't think about it. They're so busy that 8 hours can pass and they say 'oh, I'm exhausted! I'm really thirsty because they haven't drank for 8 hours'."
So Dallas based Methodist partnered with a health and wellness platform called FIX to encourage staffers to complete short, low-impact exercises throughout the workday.
"Every hour every day you would get a text message saying 'here's your challenge' and you'd have an hour to complete the challenge," says Moore. "We did pushups on the desk, we did lunges, we did a number of stretches."
Moore says she even got her family involved—and began forming better habits.
"I do now get up every hour try to stretch, take a lap around the corporate office. My friends up here and I—we've started doing a 2:00 walk every day, so it has put us in the mindset of being more active."
Some 500 Methodist employees signed up for the program… 87% completed it, with the goal of making healthy choices a daily habit.
"Even just walking a flight of stairs helps you," says Brennan, "you come back and you're more focused and have more energy. I think it was a great thing that our health and wellness department did to kind of force us to realize that this is something that we need do."
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