ETSU, Meharry Medical College to build workforce resilience program
The East Tennessee State University Ballad Health Strong BRAIN Institute (SBI) will partner with the Center for the Study of Social Determinants of Health at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. This partnership is a four-year grant project with the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) to build a workforce resilience program focused on trauma awareness and training for the state’s public health workforce.
As a workforce support initiative, the SBI and Meharry project with TDH will include training, resources and supports at the local, regional and state levels, with ongoing evaluation of trauma intervention results within the public health profession.
A project steering committee will develop an overall employee engagement plan for the $1 million grant effort. It will use the Organizational Trauma Resilience Assessment tool to measure how safe, stable and nurturing personnel find their work environment, as well as the ProQoL, a professional quality of life measure, to assess the quality of working conditions for those in the public health profession.
“‘Trauma- and resilience-informed workplace practices’ really amount to the same humanistic values that we all probably learned about in kindergarten,” said Dr. Wallace Dixon, ETSU professor of psychology and director of the SBI. “They are the values of compassion, humanity, empathy and reflective leadership. The best part about them is that they always work, and they work for all people.”
SBI will conduct the program development, implementation and evaluation activities on the eastern side of Tennessee, from Johnson County to Nashville. Meharry will coordinate and conduct the program for TDH on the state’s western side, from Nashville to Shelby County.
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