Posters

In 2025, Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences (Ontario Shores) completed its tenth biennial Employee Opinion Survey. The organization achieved our highest response rate to date of 79.3% participation and saw an increase in our engagement rate to 74%.

A strong participation rate allowed us to identify the activities that would have the most significant impact on employee engagement and experience, which supports the reduction in our retention rate.

Moral distress is the uncomfortable feeling that can happen when you feel unable to act in a way that aligns with your values, training, or expectations. When these feelings are not acknowledged or supported, they may begin to affect well-being, relationships and engagement at work.

This poster equips long-term care (LTC) leaders and clinicians with a roadmap for understanding, recognizing and responding to moral distress. It explores the unique ethical triggers of the sector—from end-of-life complexities to staffing challenges—and covers strategies to foster moral resilience. This poster will feature new, co-designed resources for LTC team members that support teamwork and communication, help to maintain psychological health and well-being, and improve the quality of resident care.

This poster will explore the practical implementation of psychological health and safety in the workplace through an internal case study and real example from a local organization. Grounded in the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the workplace, the poster will share the process of assessment, organization review and the development of a targeted action plan.

This poster shares insight into how key psychosocial factors such a workload management, organization culture, psychological support and civility and respect are identified and addressed in practice. Particular attention will be given to burnout, a growing and prevalent concern across helping professions and how intentional, system-level strategies can mitigate its impact overtime. This poster will highlight lessons learned, challenges encountered and practical tools that can be adapted across sectors. It will provide a clearer understanding of how to move from theory to action in fostering psychologically safer, healthier workplaces.

Healthcare workplace stress is often framed as burnout or resilience, but a major driver is cognitive overload, constant interruptions, task-switching, and fragmented workflows. This poster introduces a neurobehavioral lens to explain why healthcare work feels overwhelming even for highly skilled professionals.

Drawing on experience in frontline care coordination and teaching health information management, the poster uses everyday tasks such as documentation and care coordination to illustrate how attention limits, working memory, and habit patterns shape performance under pressure. It highlights why training alone fails to produce consistent behavior and how poorly designed work increases cognitive strain.

This poster will share practical strategies to reduce cognitive burden, including simplifying workflows, embedding cues, and reinforcing effective habits. This approach supports psychological health and safety by addressing how work design impacts both well-being and performance.

As organizations advance implementation of the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety, a key driver of psychosocial risk often remains unaddressed: the growing number of employees balancing work with unpaid caregiving.

Working caregivers frequently experience role conflict, emotional strain, and competing demands that impact their psychological health and ability to fully engage at work. Without intentional strategies to support this group, organizations risk limiting the effectiveness of their broader PH&S efforts.

This poster explores how caregiver-inclusive practices can be integrated into PH&S frameworks as a practical and impactful intervention. Drawing on the Ontario Caregiver Organization’s experience, we will connect caregiver challenges to core psychosocial factors such as workload, psychological support, and work-life balance.

This poster will share actionable tools to increase caregiver visibility, strengthen manager response, and embed flexible, inclusive supports into existing systems-helping translate PH&S commitments into meaningful, everyday practice.

Healthcare professionals working in hybrid models—across offsite locations, home environments, and variable schedules—face challenges in maintaining team cohesion and well-being. In response, CHEO partnered with Your Health Space to pilot a brief, structured wellness intervention adapted from the Wellness Moments framework.

The pilot embedded a 20-minute virtual wellness segment into existing monthly team meetings, designed to be engaging, practical, and feasible within time-constrained clinical settings. Content focused on applied strategies grounded in positive psychology, mindfulness, and stress management.

Quality Improvement data from 88 participants showed strong satisfaction, with high ratings for usefulness, facilitator effectiveness, and likelihood to recommend. Positive qualitative feedback highlighted the sessions as engaging, digestible, and impactful.

Following pilot success, the model was scaled hospital-wide during Health Disciplines Week. This work demonstrates the feasibility of embedding brief, virtual wellness interventions into routine structures to support staff well-being in hybrid healthcare environments.

This poster will provide practical insights into designing, implementing, and scaling low-burden wellness initiatives that can strengthen staff well-being, engagement, and connection across diverse healthcare settings.

In 2023, Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph (WDG) Public Health piloted an internal Self-Care & Well-Being Challenge during October’s Healthy Workplace Month, reimagining traditional workplace health-related initiatives, like step challenges, that have lost their novelty. Grounded in six dimensions of self-care – Emotional, Spiritual, Physical, Personal, Psychological, and Professional – the four-week, team-based challenge encouraged participants to self–report self-care activities, earn team points to win prizes and build sustainable habits.

Over the past three years, approximately 100 unique staff have participated annually. Evaluation results from 2025 demonstrate strong impact: 98% of participants reported increased prioritization of their mental health and well-being, and 97% agreed the Challenge contributed to a more positive workplace culture. Participants also reported improved well-being and mental health, felt more connected to colleagues, and increased awareness of diverse self-care practices.

This poster will share the challenge design, wellness activities offered, evaluation results, lessons learned, and next steps for future implementation.

Recognizing a vast majority of healthcare is administered outside of the walls of traditional hospital settings, our poster aims to detail the successes, challenges and lessons learned over the past 5 years, with delivering specialized mental health programming to those, not only on the frontlines delivering health care, but also those in the community as well as those behind the scenes who are often forgotten or underserved.

Drawing on the many successes the Frontline Wellness Program has had in delivering community-based mental health workshops for health care workers; we hope to share and inspire other community organizations to consider staff wellness through the delivery of accessible and convenient workshops within their organizations. Attendance at these workshops inspires broader conversations about mental health, coping and wellness as providing participants resources to pursue should they choose to.

Mental well-being among remote workers has become an important occupational health concern following the expansion of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) among 285 employees working remotely from home in Northwestern Ontario, 44% of whom worked in health care. Internal consistency was strong across all four dimensions (a = .83 to .93), and standardized factor loadings ranged from .41 to .94. Correlations with related workplace constructs were generally in the expected direction, supporting convergent validity. However, global model fit indices were weaker than recommended thresholds, suggesting that the traditional four-factor structure may not fully capture organizational culture in remote work-from-home contexts. These findings have implications for measuring workplace culture in flexible and distributed health care environments.

Organizational climate reflects workers’ shared perceptions of workplace practices, policies, and conditions that are potentially modifiable at the organizational level. This study aims to derive organizational climate dimensions using psychosocial workplace factors measured in the Northwestern Ontario Workplace and Worker Health Study. These factors align with domains reflected in the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, providing a foundation for the development of an intervention-relevant climate measure. Exploratory factor analysis will be used to identify the underlying structure among standardized composite measures of modifiable workplace conditions. Internal consistency reliability of the derived climate dimensions will be assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and coefficient omega. The resulting factor structure will inform a preliminary measurement model of organizational climate for use in subsequent analyses examining relationships among organizational culture, climate, and mental well-being. Results are in progress.

Healthcare organizations often collect Employee Assistance Program (EAP) utilization data but struggle to translate it into strategic wellness insight. This poster demonstrates how Scarborough Health Network (SHN) Wellness intentionally integrates EAP utilization trends with before-and-after Workplace Outcome Suite (WOS) survey results to inform fiscal-year wellness strategy and program planning. Rather than interpreting higher utilization as workforce deterioration, SHN reframes EAP engagement as a leading indicator of accessibility, trust, and early help-seeking. Using a one-year, SMARTER-aligned healthcare case example, EAP trends are examined alongside changes in productivity, workplace distress, engagement, and life satisfaction. Findings highlight how integrated interpretation supports priority setting, program refinement, and leadership decision-making while avoiding over-attribution of causality. The poster offers a practical, evidence-informed approach to using EAP utilization as strategic wellness intelligence to strengthen psychological safety and sustain workforce capacity in healthcare settings