Mental health resources | Take care of yourself, too! - Atlas All Access 117

Rich: Okay, so I talked about it this week on the VIP Video. Mental health right now is more important than ever, taking care of yourself in addition to taking care of your patients. So on this episode we talk to Kendra Kripal, a health benefits administrator. Is that right?

Kendra: That's correct.

Rich: I never get her title right. Benefits Administrator for Atlas MedStaff. Atlas all access starts now. All right, Kendra, welcome.

Kendra: Thank you. Welcome everybody.

Rich: How has home been?

Kendra: Well, the first three weeks were a little rough. But I decided to give up the dream of being super mom and super worker and super teacher, and I luckily have daughters that can handle their own stuff and we've just kind of now worked out a routine. So I I'm not as stressed. Things are going a little bit better. I love working from home. I really do. My days are longer because I have to stretch things out, but we go for walks and take breaks during the day to get everybody re-energized. So it's going good. It's going better.

Rich: I kind of thought that as well is, it's one of those things where you can't be all things to all people and you just, you have to just kind of prioritize things during the day. Getting back to the office here, just a little bit this week, and last week like I have has been a nice break, but I know my wife is probably at home going crazy with our son. So trying to-

Kendra: Yeah. And I had to stop Facebook for a while just because that's what'll make you feel like a really yucky mom for a while if you keep reading and believing all the posts that everybody's is putting on there. So.

Rich: Right. No, I totally agree. And that kind of leads into why I wanted to talk to you this week was about mental health. I had a conversation with the nurse over the weekend about finding their quiet place, finding that place where they can, where you can kind of center yourself and get back to some sort of regular mind frame. But if you need additional help, how and what, and I know we've talked about this before, how and what do we offer through the EAP program to every one of our employees?

Kendra: Right. So we would have the EAP through the standard. EAP, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is the employee assistance program. What this does is it offers our employees three over the phone or some sort of platform counseling sessions with a therapist so that you can talk through your issues, you can find out about how to deal with your stress. Obviously there's a lot. How to deal with loss, financial loss, because everybody's experiencing that. Employment loss. A lot of people are experiencing that. And just loss in general of the freedoms that we used to have. Being able to just go anywhere, see anybody, those kinds of things.

Kendra: So it's a very good program to have in place. We've had it in place for a long time now, but especially nowadays, it's very important to have that, that in place to let people know that, our employees know, that you don't have to be signed up for our health insurance. It's available to everybody. It's free. So we really want to encourage you to take advantage of this so that you can get through this as the best version of you as you can, which may not be the version that was before, but we're all just trying and that's all you can ask yourself to do.

Rich: It's the new version at least, right?

Kendra: It's the new version of yourself. Correct.

Rich: Right. Okay. So how do, and this is available to all of our employees, not just if you have our health insurance, how do you access that information if, let's say you just want to read it, you don't even want to act on it. You just want to see what's there.

Kendra: Right. And you kind of touched on it right there, that you don't have to participate in actual counseling sessions to benefit from this. There are so many videos and articles online that's not just about this situation that we're going through now, but it helps with parenting and assisted with helping aging parents or financial, not a whole bunch of information.

Kendra: So the best way to do that is you can go directly to it by going to www.workhealthlife.com/standard3. But we also have it available through our ADP website. So what you can do is you can log into ADP and there's actually a site, or a site, sorry. What you can do is you can log, so let me share my screen here with you. All right. Share. Okay, so can you see me, Rich?

Rich: I can, yes.

Kendra: Okay, so this is the home page of ADP. So if you have not yet logged into ADP to view your benefits or your payroll information, shoot an email to me at: benefits@atlasmedstaff.com, and we can get you the link in which you can get signed up and registered with ADP so you can access this. Okay. So the first place you want to go, this is the homepage right here and over here under Wellness, the physical, emotional, and financial. We talk about our ADP and what you do is you just click on this link right here. Can you see that Rich?

Rich: Okay, so Work Health Life, and here down right here under Resource Center tools is all of their COVID-19 resources. So if you click the COVID-19 resources, it has three articles about learning more about the COVID ID, five articles about self isolation, two articles about job loss, all these different things that they're seeing pop up in terms of mental wellness in order to help you cope.

Rich: Now, if for some reason you do feel like you need more than just an article or a video, these are the ways that you can access the EAP services: you can call them, you can actually chat with them, you can text them or email them and you can download the mobile app so that you have it anywhere that you are, you have access to those resources.

Rich: So I just want to repeat this again because this is super important. These are all programs that are free of charge to all of our employees that Atlas has paid for. Right?

Kendra: That is correct.

Rich: This is all part of our offering from a benefits standpoint. And so all of this is available right now.

Kendra: Yes.

Rich: Want to call ... If you just want to read articles which I saw. I think I'm going to read some of those after I get off.

Kendra: Yes. They are really good ones.

Rich: If you just need that. Just that. That might be enough. But if you need to talk to somebody too, that information is there. You can talk to, you can call, email, go through the app. I think there's a chat function on the app isn't there?

Kendra: Yes. There's chat function on the app and the desktop that I just showed you so it's not face to face. Oh, that's another important thing. This is all confidential. So we don't receive any information about who's calling in or why you're calling in. All we receive is just if people are accessing it that count. The number of people that may be accessing it. So we want to make sure that you understand that your situation is going to be completely confidential, even to us. So we don't want people to not call in because they're afraid of someone knowing who they are because no one will know who you are or why you're calling in.

Rich: Quite honestly, I think all of us could probably use a little encouragement or something right now.

Kendra: Absolutely.

Rich: Utilize those resources online. So yeah, I mean that was my last question is what if you're scared? What if you're scared someone might find out or whatever, which okay seems silly to me, but I know there are people out there that have that, that worry about that. Like my employer knows that I'm accessing this about mental health when it shouldn't be something that we should keep in the dark. It's something that we need to talk about openly. All of these resources are here for you to utilize and totally confidential. We have no idea who is accessing them.

Kendra: And that's okay to feel like you want that anonymity. We certainly don't want you to feel like you have to be open about who you are and what you're calling in for. So, anonymity we know is important to some people and we want to make sure that you understand that yes, it is completely anonymous, completely confidential and no one will know except for you. And certainly a lot of people need that validation that what they're doing is okay. You're normal is not my normal. My normal is not my Mom's normal even. So how you're feeling is valid and it's okay to feel that way, but if you need that extra boost and letting yourself know that you're doing okay and what you're doing is fine, please call into this EAP because that's what it's there for.

Rich: Physical health is just as important as mental health and vice versa. So, if something was wrong with you physically, you would go get that taken care of.

Kendra: Correct.

Rich: No different here. If you feel like you need to talk to someone or you just need that little boost, you need to read that article about self isolation or, whatever that is, it's available there.

Kendra: Yes, absolutely.

Rich: So Kendra, I miss you in the office. Everybody in the office.

Kendra: Thank you. I miss you too.

Rich: I hope, I hope, I hope we get back to normal soon. August can't come soon enough for all of us.

Kendra: Right, right, absolutely.

Rich: Again, if you need any additional information, we will put it all down here. Maybe not right here, but we'll put it somewhere on the screen somewhere maybe. I'm not the editor. We'll put it somewhere on the screen, including the links to the ... If you want to just go through the work of the EAP, the websites that she listed first or through ADP. If you have any questions you can always contact. What's the benefits email again Kendra?

Kendra: The benefits email is: benefits@atlasmedstaff.com

Rich: And you personally man that?

Kendra: I do.

Rich: That website.

Kendra: Yeah, so there's only one person who's monitoring it, which is me. No one else gets it. So there again, we're trying to help you with your anonymity as much as possible.

Rich: There you go. Well, thank you for being on this week. It was vitally important. After having that conversation, I thought, you know what? We absolutely need to talk about this again.

Kendra: Absolutely. I agree. Thank you for having me.

Rich: All right. See you next week.

Kendra: Bye.