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'Culture of wellness' is YSU goal
YOUNGSTOWN
Two major Valley institutions strive to make employee fitness and wellness a way of life.
They make available on-campus activities, services and facilities that promote their employees’ physical and emotional health.
“It’s a culture of wellness that I would really love to create more of here on campus,” said Carrie Clyde, Youngstown State University’s wellness coordinator.
“Moving more, sitting less is one of our big things,” said Clyde, who launched YSU’s employee-wellness effort when she joined the university in 2009.
The university won the Ohio Department of Health’s Healthy Ohio Healthy Worksite Gold Award last year for its commitment to employee health, having won silver in that competition in 2013 and 2014 and bronze in 2011 and 2012.
“Our mission as a whole organization is to help others be well in body, mind and spirit, so we are starting that with our own employees,” said Sally Hammel, manager of internal communications at Mercy Health, which operates St. Elizabeth Youngstown and Boardman hospitals and St. Joseph Health Center in Warren.
Mercy Health wants the more than 5,000 employees it has in the Mahoning Valley to be good wellness and fitness role models for the institutions’ patients, Hammel said.
“Being healthy helps reduce the stress of the job,” Hammel added.
Clyde and Hammel said their institutions’ employee wellness goals include having more motivated and productive employees, better employee morale and better attendance at work with lower employee health care and workers compensation costs.
YSU has an employee-wellness steering committee composed of faculty and staff, including benefits administration officials.
It also has 12 campus Wellness Champions, whose goal is to motivate employees to participate in wellness activities.
The university’s employee-wellness program benefits from the assistance of on-campus academic experts in exercise science, nutrition, physical therapy and nursing, Clyde said.
“The most gratifying thing is when an employee comes to you and says: ‘You know what? My blood pressure’s decreased because I’ve been walking,’” Clyde observed.
It’s “very common” to see YSU employees, who’ve donned athletic shoes, walking around the campus perimeter in groups during their lunch breaks, said Clyde, who leads these scheduled walks. “It’s a lot of fun because it’s social as well,” she added.
YSU has a 12-week annual Walk Your Way to Wellness pedometer campaign, in which employees set personal goals.
The university’s full-time faculty and staff pay a $100 annual membership fee for the use of the Andrews Recreation Center, with a $50 rebate if they use it at least 90 times during the year.
They have free access to Beeghly Center and the Watson and Tressel Training Site.
Thirty-nine percent of the university’s 1,200 full-time faculty and staff members participate in some form of employee-wellness program.
At nearby St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, employees can sign up for 24/7 badge-access to the fitness center, which is in a former warehouse building.
With a wide variety of exercise machines, the center includes a group spinning classroom with 12 stationary bicycles and complete locker room and shower facilities for men and women.
“I want to try to practice what I preach. I teach my patients that they need to do some exercise on a regular basis,” said Dr. Rudy Krafft, director of the hospital’s family-medicine residency program.
Dr. Krafft, who was interviewed as he prepared to use an elliptical machine, said he recently began working out in the hospital’s fitness center. “This is a beautiful facility. They’ve got new equipment,” he observed.
The young medical students and residents around him help motivate him to engage in physical-fitness activities, he said.
“They push me a little bit. Some of them are in real good shape, and they come over here on a fairly regular basis,” Dr. Krafft said.
“We all do the Be-Well-Within program, which is part of our insurance plan. We go online, and there’s a variety of things that we can choose from to do,” including a health assessment with suggestions for improvement, he said.
“We get group e-mails to let us know about different classes” in health and fitness topics, including dietitian-led classes and exercise classes, he added.
While Dr. Krafft was working out in the fitness center, his colleague, Dr. Dinah Fedyna, a family practitioner who teaches residents and medical students, was participating elsewhere on the hospital campus in a late-afternoon yoga class for hospital employees.
“Our job is extremely stressful, and I come home wound-up and tense, mainly from working on the computer,” Dr. Fedyna said, explaining why she participates in the yoga class.
“Yoga is a lot more strenuous than it looks,” she observed.
“It looks like you’re just standing there doing nothing, but you’re actually using a lot of muscles and stretching things that really need to be stretched, which is really great,” she added.
Having the fitness center on the hospital campus is convenient for employees, who can use it before and after work, she observed.
“You’re more likely to go do something when you don’t have to drive elsewhere to do it,” she said.
As part of their health promotion efforts, YSU and St. Elizabeth have strict anti-smoking policies.
YSU limits smoking to a few designated campus locations.
St. Elizabeth completely bans tobacco use on hospital property and enforces that ban with video cameras.