Last week, Massachusetts hospitals launched the second cohort of the statewide Healthy Work Environment (HWE) Academy, which empowers nursing teams to lead sustainable improvements in workplace culture, nurse retention, and patient outcomes.

The HWE Academy is part of a broader initiative that the MHA Board of Trustees approved in early 2025 to further the commonwealth’s leadership in healthy and innovative work environments for nurses and care teams. Every hospital has committed to adopting one evidence-based program to support frontline professionals, with the Academy serving as one opportunity for participation.

Last year, the first cohort of 10 hospitals started their journey in the Clinical Scene Investigator Academy’s Nursing Workforce Solutions program – an initiative of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN). The second cohort includes an additional nine hospitals, plus one repeat hospital from the first cohort that is enrolling another of its patient care units. Those hospitals are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Beverly Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Emerson Health, Fairview Hospital, Lowell General Hospital, New England Baptist Hospital, UMass Memorial Health – Milford Regional Medical Center, and UMass Memorial Medical Center.

MHA is collaborating with AACN on the recruitment and implementation of both cohorts. The first cohort was made possible through funding support from Johnson & Johnson to AACN. Because that cohort was so successful, MHA opted to underwrite the costs of cohort two.

This second run of the HWE Academy is an intensive 12-month process in which each participating hospital identifies a nursing team unit to address a specific on-the-job challenge that is hindering their ability to work at their best. Through a series of in-person and virtual workshops, the teams will design, implement, and sustain projects to address that challenge. They will have access to educational sessions and expert mentoring throughout their journey and will be offered “train the trainer” resources to help scale their projects to other units in their organizations.

“This is a continuation of the nation-leading approach Massachusetts hospitals and health systems are taking to support their dedicated care professionals and spread their impact,” said Patricia Noga, PhD, R.N., vice president of clinical affairs at MHA. “MHA and our Board of Trustees are excited to support these nursing teams through this new cohort and make their ideas come to life at the bedside.”

The coordinated statewide initiative comes at a time of prolonged strain for the entire healthcare system, and as workers struggle with burnout, administrative burdens, and increasingly complex patient needs.

Some of the projects that this second cohort will work towards include:

• Creating a standardized post-event debrief and emotional support process for a set of clearly defined traumatic births and obstetric emergencies in a labor and delivery unit;
• Forming a transparent nursing workload-based assignment tool to ensure equitable patient assignments, and to strengthen trust, communication, and staff wellbeing; and
• Using data to create meaningful recognition programs, both from leadership and peers to improve nurse retention and satisfaction.

The statewide healthy work environment commitment is an initiative born out of MHA’s Workforce Leadership Task Force, which is composed of hospital and health system CEOs and chief nursing officers. The Task Force previously helped launch the Find Your Place in Healthcare campaign to draw people into the caring field, as well as a first-in-the-nation effort to reform the credentialing process with clinicians’ wellbeing in mind.