Frontline Workers Wellness Toolkit

Welcome to the NYS TINRC Frontline Workers Wellness Toolkit

This web-based toolkit is interactive and easy to use. No matter what your role is in your organization, you can find helpful tools and information to support your wellness. These resources can help you create a wellness plan that works for you, your team, or your whole organization.

Frontline workers play an important role in keeping people healthy, safe, and supported. They work in many areas, such as healthcare, retail, emergency services, transportation, law enforcement, childcare, and education—any job where staff have direct contact with the public. Their work is essential to our communities and industries. The following resources can be used by anyone, in any profession, to support health and wellness.

What is your role?

What is stress?

Stress is a feeling of worry that we all experience when things get tough or challenging. Meeting deadlines, trying new things, and stretching oneself can cause us a little bit of stress. But experiencing situations that are scary and harmful for long periods of time can cause us stress that is harmful to our bodies.

Below are definitions of some terms that frontline workers may be feeling. It can help frontline workers understand the feeling by naming it.

Burnout

“Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.”

–Katherine May, Enchantment

Moral injury

Stress that occurs when one believes they know the right thing to do, but institutional or other constraints make it difficult to pursue a course of action.

Secondary traumatic stress

Secondary traumatic stress is when someone experiences symptoms of traumatic stress after exposure to someone else’s traumatic event. This can be from hearing about it or even imagining what happened. Common symptoms can include thinking about the event over and over, irritability, avoidance, and withdrawal.

Empathy fatigue

Empathy fatigue is a deep tiredness in one’s body, emotions, and spirit. One might feel like they have nothing left to give. It may become hard to care for others. Their hope and optimism about their work might start to go down.

"By prioritizing employee wellness, companies recognize that their most valuable asset is their workforce, and investing in their well-being leads to numerous benefits."
– Business of Well-Being, Corporate Wellness Magazine

What is self-care?

Both individuals and organizations have an important role to promote self-care.

Individuals

Individual self-care is the practice of taking care of one’s own health and well-being. Each person has their own understanding of self-care, but this care can cover all aspects including physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

Organizations

Promoting self-care at work means organizations have created a safe and healthy place where everyone feels supported. All employees can take care of themselves at work and feel supported when they go home.

Where are you on this journey?

You might already have a self-care plan that works well and are looking for more ideas to improve it. Or you may be just starting and want help creating a plan. Either way, you can find what you need here. Everyone’s self-care plan is different because it depends on their lifestyle. These plans can change over time and should fit each person’s needs.

Create a self-care plan that works for you

Everyone has different needs when it comes to taking care of themselves. A good self-care plan should match a person’s daily life, interests, and goals. While looking at the list of plans below, think about what feels helpful, realistic, and easy to follow.

A self-care plan is not one-size-fits-all. It can be adjusted as life changes, and it should feel supportive, not stressful. Take time to explore the options and choose what feels right.

Have a few minutes? We want to hear from you

Take our short anonymous feedback survey about the FLW toolkit so we can best meet your needs!