FAQs

Beginning in the fall of 2023, we will begin enrolling WU health care workers to take part in a 6-month pilot test of the Gateway2Wellness program. When you go to our enrollment page, you’ll be asked a few brief questions about who your employer is (WU or BJC) and your job type. In 2024, BJC employees will be invited to join.

Enroll here!

Any worker who supports patient health care through their day-to-day work, either directly or indirectly, is considered a health care worker. Take this brief survey to see if you are eligible:

Am I a HCW?

If you work in a clinical or hospital setting where patient care is provided, you are a health care worker! Most WU and BJC employees are considered health care workers – if what you do in your job supports patient care (including clinical research), even if you don’t have direct contact with patients every day, you are a health care worker! Learn more here.

Whether your employed by WU or BJC is determined by where your paycheck comes from.

You can complete our CONTACT form to be added to a waitlist for the G2W program. When you are eligible, we will contact you.

Participants of the 6-month pilot of G2W will be reimbursed with Amazon eGift Cards for completing the weekly and monthly program surveys. If you complete all the surveys during the 6-month period, you will earn $105.

Participation in this program is completely voluntary, and will not impact your health care benefits or employment status. If you respond with STOP to any study text messages, this will unenroll you from the study. Before removing you from the study roster, a Navigator will text or email you to confirm that you would like to end your participation.

Our overall goal is to change the system by showing precise evidence on what health care workers need. By assessing functioning in 5 domains that are known to be critical for work-life balance (stress, burnout, mood, sleep and support), as well as for work productivity, we hope to not only improve your work-life balance but also to change the culture of our workplaces so that conversations about mental well-being are open and productive, not hidden and shaming. This project includes many stakeholders – from our health system as well as from institutions that are leaders in HCW mental health. The goal of their involvement is to help support our system in making changes that you help us identify are needed by participating in this project.

Health care workers employed by WU will be invited to participate in a pilot test of the Gateway2Wellness program for a total of 6 months. During this time, they will receive digital assessments through the app, and will receive personalized resource recommendations based on the results. By participating in this program, you are helping us to develop a digital platform that will help effectively link people to relevant and helpful mental health resources.

But that’s not all – by taking part and sharing feedback on your experience, you are helping us to provide concrete data on what HCW needs are. This helps us make a stronger case for change at the institutional level. The bottom line: this doesn’t work without your input! It may not be the magic bullet right away, but with your help, we have a much better chance of making real and sustainable changes to how we think about and address the well-being of our employees.

• PROMIS anxiety
• PROMIS depression
• PROMIS emotional support
• Financial/Family support question from the EMPOWER survey
• Brief Inventory of Percieved Stress (BIPS)
• Professional Fulfillment Inventory (PFI)
• Sleep Quality Scale (SQS)
• Mental Help Seeking Intention Scale
• Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CDRS)
• Mental Health Self-Efficacy Scale (MHSES)
• Multifaceted Organizational Health Climate Assessment (MOHCA)

As a participant, you will have access to a private dashboard that will show you which assessments you’ve completed, a graph of your scores over time, and which assessments are coming up. You’ll also be able to download PDF’s of each of your assessments.

There will be three types of messages you’ll receive through the G2W Dashboard and you can decide whether you want them to come via SMS text to your cell phone, or to your email.

1. Reminders of weekly check-ins
2. Reminders of monthly surveys
3. Direct messages from the G2W Navigators

The resources for this project are evidence-based or evidence-informed and include:

• self-guided content (like apps or articles)
• services (like psychiatry or counseling)
• programs (like groups, mindfulness classes, and leadership training)
• resources specific to health care worker wellbeing
• all services and programs that are part of your Wash U or BJC health benefits plan

The initial list of resources is based on what is already offered to all WU and BJC employees, as well as successful programs and content offered by our stakeholder institutions. But our goal is to make YOU a stakeholder too. If you decide to participate in the program, we will be asking you for feedback on services you’ve used or resources you’d like to see us add.

There are 3 ways you can give feedback on resources:

• The monthly survey will give you an opportunity to rate and give feedback about any resources you have used.
• Schedule a call with a Navigator or send a text message to the Navigator.
• You can also provide anonymous feedback by filling out our CONTACT form

Feedback will be incorporated as the resource list is updated over time. We will also collect confidential feedback from participants on their experience using resources and services.

The Gateway2Wellness program is approved by Washington University’s Institutional Review Board, which requires the study to meet high standards of confidentiality and participant protection, meaning that our records are not accessible to employers or health care providers. As an additional layer of protection for sensitive health information, the Gateway2Wellness team has also obtained a Federal Certificate of Confidentiality, which provides the highest level of legal protection for individual data and protects participants’ information from being shared with outside entities.

We will monitor changes over time in the study’s health measures to determine whether the program was effective in improving stress, anxiety, mood, and other health outcomes. Averages of results across participants (NOT any data that can identify you as an individual) will be shared with WU to plan future improvements in employee wellness.

No. Data you provide to our study will not be entered into your medical record; your individual data will not be shared with your employer; study personnel will not attempt to access your medical data on MyChart or EPIC.

No. Your individual data will not be shared with anyone outside of the study team. Summary data on all participants may be provided to your employer to drive changes in employee health and wellness programs, but no data that can identify you as an individual will be shared.

Low. We will strictly follow the regulations governing the protection of your data, as required and monitored by our Human Research Protections Office and other regulatory compliance groups at Washington University and the Federal government.

No. Your employer will not see any data that can identify you as an individual, and will not know if you are participating or not. We are an independent program and are not associated with any evaluative part of WUSM or BJC. The only outgoing information from the Gateway2Wellness program are de-identified usage stats and anonymous feedback to improve the program, well-being resources, and workplace culture.  We take confidentiality very seriously. 

Mental health emergencies are very rare, but can be deadly if not addressed quickly. The most common emergency is having thoughts about wanting to die, hurt yourself, or harm others. If you are having thoughts like this, or starting to make plans to act on them, crisis hotlines with 24/7 counseling are the main source for immediate help, followed by going to the nearest emergency room. If you are having these thoughts and feelings, you can call 988 for immediate assistance.

Here are some places you can go for that:

• General Medical Education free and confidential counseling
• Washington Univeristy Department of Psychiatry
• WU Human Resources Mental Health resources