HEATHER HARTMAN-HALL

MedStar Health

For a decade at MedStar Health, Heather Hartman-Hall has worked to normalize how healthcare workers talk about and care for their own mental health. As senior director for wellbeing and mental health, she has built that priority into the workplace itself, beginning as a faculty member of the internal medicine residency program in MedStar Health’s Baltimore hospitals. There, she worked with program leadership to create a distinctive wellbeing program that brought mental health into residents’ daily training, facilitating group discussions on coping strategies and providing individual coaching to help residents manage stress, process difficult clinical events and sustain their best work in patient care.

That effort expanded into a systemwide role in 2021. Hartman-Hall now leads similar programming for MedStar Health associates across Maryland and Washington, D.C., directing a team of mental health coaches in a position she designed to embed mental health attention into the workplace. She consults with leaders to foster a culture of wellbeing and partners with the psychiatric service line and employee assistance program to expedite evaluation and treatment. Using the Stress First Aid framework to establish a shared language around distress, she also led the implementation of an anonymous interactive screening program developed in consultation with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, allowing associates to identify their needs and find resources confidentially.

The results affirm the need her work addresses. Last fiscal year, her team logged more than 10,000 touchpoints with associates, while resident burnout scores improved and fell well below national averages. For Hartman-Hall, the individual stories carry the deepest meaning. One resident she had coached confidentially later spoke at a large meeting about how easily she had been able to reach out during a period of distress in her first year of training, saying she was not sure she would still be here had she not. Rarely does a week pass without someone seeking her advice or help connecting to support, a reminder that she has become a trusted resource for healthcare workers who once may not have reached out at all.