It's something that definitely keeps me up at night. We have formal processes and systems in place with employee assistance and a dedicated support service exclusively for our nursing staff, which is not common to all of our employees across the system and which I think is important.
We need to have regular conversations with our nurses, and that's through town halls and it's through direct contact. I reach out from time to time directly to a nurse, after either an incident or a challenging situation, and make sure to visit our nurses in communities so that I can hear from them about what goes well and what doesn't go so well.
I think that part of that mental health and wellness and those supports is going to be key. They are exhausted, so we're trying to find ways to have that surge capacity, which is why I talked about the mobile health surge team and, when our teams are exhausted and mental health and wellness are at risk, having the ability to replace them and have people recoup. I think every regional executive responsible for health is having those discussions directly with our nursing staff.
Highlighting what they do, when I joined this department I did the nursing awards, which is something we do to recognize the heroic efforts of our nurses. Someone said, “If you save a life, you're a hero, and if you save over a hundred, you're a nurse.” That stuck with me, because that's what they do every day. I just wanted to share that.