KGH has been recognized with two awards for our efforts to improve the workplace for our staff. Amongst our efforts, KGH offers lunchtime yoga classes for employees.
KGH has been recognized with two awards for our efforts to improve the workplace for our staff. Amongst our efforts, KGH offers lunchtime yoga classes for employees.
Credit
Matthew Manor

Over the past few years, Kingston General Hospital has been busy striving to meet our strategic goal of making KGH one of the best places to work. These efforts are paying dividends and this past week they earned us two significant awards.

The first is from KFL&A Public Health. It’s given our hospital a Gold in its annual Workplace Wellness Awards. They measure how well organizations are doing in supporting staff wellness across a range of areas, such as promoting physical activity, healthy eating, infectious diseases prevention, and reducing stress.

“Health promotion and prevention is what public health is all about, so it’s great to be recognized this way,” says Joanna Noonan, Manager of Occupational Health, Safety and Wellness. “It reinforces that KGH has a lot of resources in place for staff when they want or need them.”

Among them are our lunchtime yoga and meditation programs, corporate gym memberships, Weight Watchers, smoking cessation workshops and a range of other supports available on our wellness website, www.kghwellness.ca.

“Another example is the opening of our renovated courtyard for staff to use, and we’re not done yet,” says Noonan. “Over the next year we will continue to try new things to support wellness at KGH, including the launch of the Living Well, Working Well staff newsletter, and an organizational review of Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace."

Other winners of a Gold award this year include Queen’s University, Keys Job Centre, Ongwanada, Lennox and Addington County General Hospital and Hotel Dieu Hospital.

Along with our Gold award, KGH also was handed an important award last week in Toronto. For the second year in a row, we scored a Silver in the Quality Healthy Workplace Awards from the Ontario Hospital Association. This time, our submission highlighted our work to measure and improve staff and physician engagement and our focus on improving staff health and wellness as part of our overall corporate engagement plan.

“These awards are designed to drive continuous improvement and the bar is always rising so we are very happy to see we are maintaining our high standing,” says Micki Mulima, Director of Healthy Workplace Services.

The award recognizes an organization’s efforts to improve their healthcare workplace in ways that contribute to their employees’ quality of work life and the quality of care and services they provide.

As examples, it asks organizations to share what they have done to ensure there is respect in the workplace, that employees have manageable workloads and receive job performance feedback and that there are health promotion programs in place. It also looks to see how staff job satisfaction and stress levels are measured and that workplace injuries are reported and followed up on, to name a few of the criteria.

Other Silver award winners include London Health Sciences Centre, Hamilton Health Sciences, The Ottawa Hospital, and Hotel Dieu Hospital.

"Participating in this award program really helps us put into perspective how we are doing on creating a safe and healthy workplace for everyone who works, learns or volunteer at KGH," says Mulima.“