Evaluating the Feasibility of Training and Deploying Peer Champions to Support Healthcare Workers Psychosocial Needs Utilizing the STEADY Wellness Program Framework

COVID-19 has negatively impacted the mental health of Healthcare Workers (HCWs) who are already at-risk due to their high-pressure work. Many organizations have offered reactive support, without a structured implementation approach, solid evidence-base and/or evaluation of the real-world implementation. Over the last 4 years, our team designed an evidence-informed staff wellness program, known as STEADY (Social Support, Tracking distress, Education And Discussion and communitY), guided by strategies from the fields of Knowledge Translation and Implementation Science. STEADY aims to increase resilience and mitigate negative mental health outcomes associated with workplace stress by increasing sense of social support and community at work and educating staff on mental health and coping. We successfully implemented STEADY in 10 teams in a hospital for 1-year as a quality improvement project. We found that STEADY was feasible to implement and pragmatically useful in supporting distressed HCWs and that staff wanted peer support. We adapted STEADY, based on these findings. The new Peer-Led STEADY (STEADY-P) includes training 200 HCWs as peer supporters with the skills and resources to flexibly use the STEADY-P framework to support their teams with some support in delivering programming to HCWs. The aim of this research project is to evaluate the feasibility of implementing STEADY-P across a large organization, while exploring impact on HCW who engage in programming and on organisation absenteeism data. We will measure the acceptability and impact of STEADY-P facilitator training and collect data on how the STEADY-P framework is used in practice. This will include gathering reports of the facilitator's experience, and the HCWs experience of receiving support. Data collected in this project will benefit future implementation of HCW wellness programming, while filling a key gap in this area of research.