Ochsner Health is a system that delivers health to the people of Louisiana, Mississippi and the Gulf South with a mission to Serve, Heal, Lead, Educate and Innovate.
Education is central to IMESO’s activities. Educational programs and services are available to all employees and, especially for, physicians, administrative staff, medical students, residents, and fellows. The aim of each of these programs is to integrate healing of the mind, body, and spirit of caregivers so that they in turn can offer holistic or integrative care to all they serve. IMESO’s educational programs and services provide a culture that recognizes and dignifies the spiritual nature of people and medicine. See Mission and Vision statement above. As a way of connecting the mission, values, and virtues, IMESO uses a teaching tool which is pictured below.
Below are brief descriptions of some of the many programs and services that IMESO sponsors for employees.
This is a seven-week course for Queensland/Ochsner medical students entails the application of virtues and character strengths to build character and decrease stress and burnout. For more information contact IMESO.
1. Guidance: It provides tried and true guidelines to make moral decisions in interpersonal situations with patients and colleagues
2. Common Language: It provides a common language in professional and personal life.
3. Excellence: It provides marks of excellence in medicine
4. Habit Development: It provides the basis for habit development
5. Integration: It provides a mindful and not mechanical process for treatment and relationship development.
6. Character: It offers the mindful development of character.
7. Self-awareness: It requires self-awareness and the motivation to act in a virtuous manner – to do good for others.
8. Goodness: The result of character development is a greater awareness of altruism.
9. Way of Being: Virtue in medicine as it becomes ingrained promotes a natural way of being and becomes a role model for others.
10. Internal Harmony: Virtue that is practiced produces internal harmony and well-being. This is an integration between cognition and emotion, freedom and adherence to ideals both individual and communal.
11. Moral Lifestyle: A virtue framework develops an individuated moral style.
12. Virtue Traits and Behavior: A virtuous physician embodies virtue traits and uses them to care for others.
This course is a three-week, credit bearing, course for all managers. It is based on the integration of character strengths to insure satisfied employees and well-being. This course can be adapted for all administrators so that a common language of virtues can be used throughout the system, especially the mission and values at Ochsner.
Spirituality is made concrete in the workplace by teaching values and virtues as a framework for the profession of medicine and healthcare in general. IMESO programs all contain some aspect of value and virtue. For example, the staff of IMESO has taken the mission words of Ochsner and have correlated mission, value and virtue words to create a spirituality of purpose. So, for example, we heal with compassion based on the virtue of humanity; we lead with integrity based on the virtue of courage, and we serve with the patient-first based on the virtue of transcendence.
Grand Rounds Series: Spirituality Understood Anew with Assessment. A Grand Rounds Series: On February 28, 2019 a Grand Rounds on Spirituality as a Psychological Construct: Its Value for the Helping Professions was presented by a nationally known personality psychologist, Dr. Ralph Piedmont. Dr. Piedmont received his Ph.D. in Personality Psychology from Boston University. Dr. Piedmont is the President of the Center for Professional Studies. His current research interests focus on the measurement of Spiritual Transcendence, a construct that represents a broad, nondenominational, motivational measure of spirituality. Dr. Piedmont is extensively published in the scientific literature and is on the editorial boards for Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, Assessment, and Journal of Personality Assessment. He was the founding editor of the new APA journal, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. If you wish to view the video, please contact IMESO.
New: IMESO offers courses based on the inclusion of virtue language and practice for medical students and to all members of the Ochsner community. This is an effort to bring together the mission, values and virtues of Ochsner to make it a better workplace environment. Outcomes of these workshops and courses are collecting data to measure changes in workplace spirit. For more information, contact IMESO.
Workplace Spirituality Research at Ochsner adds to the engagement and meaning profile of Ochsner’s employees. For more information on workplace spirituality, contact IMESO.
IMESO measures a spiritual culture by using survey instruments which evaluate workplace spirit, which includes meaning, values, interconnection, and inner life, and workplace attitude which includes organizational commitment, intention to stay, work satisfaction, job involvement and self- esteem at work. It has developed instruments to measure the presence and growth in virtues and behaviors that are associated with virtue in medicine which determine culture.