CO-CARES
Bridging the gap between health care workers and supportive resources...
...Because sustainable work requires sustainable people.
Welcome to CO-CARES
Serving the health care and public health workforce.
CO-CARES is the Colorado Association of Resilient and Equitable Systems.
Do you work in health care, public health, and/or emergency management? Are you a caregiver, public health professional, or health care leader who was impacted by the COVID-19 response?
CO-CARES provides health care workers and public health professionals with resources to support recovery, as well as develop well-being and resilience at the personal, team, and organizational level.
Work & Well-Being Webinars
The Work & Well-Being webinars provide an opportunity to learn evidence-based information about essential wellness topics as well as engage in activities that support your health and well-being. The recorded webinars offer skills and strategies, guide goal setting, and help you practice wellness activities to maintain sustainable change.
GRIT was developed by the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. This free, online, self-guided resilience training can be used within your own social networks after your community has experienced a trauma. GRIT trains participants to promote wellness and resilience in the wake of stress or disasters. Strengthening coping skills and spreading support can have a positive impact on healing and resilience for everyone.
The GRIT Core program is a set of short, self-paced modules (two and a half hours total) that will show you how to build resilience in your circle. You’ll learn how to help family, friends, and neighbors build resilience, see beyond their trauma, and move into a better tomorrow. You can become a GRIT coach in just a few hours.
During this short course, you will:
- Gain a basic understanding of resilience, common stress responses in disasters, and stress-related problems.
- Develop tools to help build strength and resilience within your friends, family groups, and throughout your entire community.
- Learn how to support and listen to someone who is struggling with a disaster or hardship.
- Strengthen your coping skills, self-efficacy, and resilience while helping others around you do the same.
- Recognize the signs of when someone may need a formal mental health counselor and learn how and where to refer your friends and loved ones.
- Gain access to valuable community resources and learn how to guide individuals to additional resources, when needed.
When you sign up for the GRIT training, you will have access to the GRIT Core track as well as four additional tracks designed to address events experienced by health care and public health workers (GRIT-4Health), educators (GRIT-4ED), small business owners and leadership (GRIT-LEAD), and military and first-responders (GRIT-SERVE). You will also have access to multiple resources and additional content.
Resilience Workshops
Resilience Workshops provide your organization or team with an opportunity to learn various psychoeducational topics and have discussions regarding what they mean for you and your workplace. These short workshops bring health care leaders together with their staff to learn about psychoeducational topics, conduct wellness activities, and discuss topics such as burnout, stress, and resilience.
Participants do not need advanced knowledge of the psychoeducational topic in order to participate in the workshops effectively. We provide an introduction to the concept and are able to answer questions. Following the educational presentation, we have structured group discussions to dive into how employees feel regarding the specific topic. After the discussion, there are additional resilience activities relevant to the topic for teams and organizations to participate in.
Toolkit Talks
Toolkit Talks are a series of recorded webinars that offer a deeper dive into a specific toolkit. Learn workable strategies for facilitating the toolkit at your organization, toolkit concepts, and in depth details regarding the toolkit.
Joy in Work
This five-part webinar series guides supervisors, managers, and leaders at all levels through the Joy in Work toolkit from the National Association of County and City Health Officials. The toolkit helps develop deep conversation skills regarding workplace recovery and resilience. In addition to making valuable peer connections, participants learn workable strategies to help increase joy in the workplace, reduce burnout, and promote more resilient work environments through conversation.
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Racial Justice Competency Model (RJCM)
The RJCM is designed to ensure the public health workforce is able to understand and address the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, and health. The model aims to provide public health professionals with a resource to reflect upon the knowledge, skills, and values needed to provide equitable, culturally competent care and services to all individuals and communities, regardless of race or ethnicity.
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Succession planning for local health departments
This three part video series, Succession planning for local health departments, dives deeply into a toolkit already developed by one of our partner organizations. Succession planning can and should be a process consciously and thoughtfully approached throughout the employee life cycle to ensure knowledge is successfully transferred between mission-critical individuals and leadership roles are continually manned. This process should happen well before a leader or mission-critical individual transition takes place. This session will provide a tangible framework/template to get you started.
Coaching for Change
We are researching the best free resources available to health care workers across Colorado and presenting them in short informational videos so you can decide what fits your needs.
Topics include burnout, compassion fatigue, stress, outdoor recreation, psychological safety, and more.
Leadership Learning Series
This series of self-paced, web-based modules provide health care managers and leadership evidence-based guidance to promote a culture of organizational wellness. Topics have been identified as both timely and compelling by national workplace wellness experts and leadership.
Mobile Health Evaluation Toolkit
This toolkit is designed for health care workers who would benefit from implementing mobile health into their organizations or want to make mobile health recommendations to patients. These materials are intended for healthcare and behavioral healthcare providers, system administrators, and health officials. The goal is to help health care providers competently and confidently select mobile health options to recommend to patients, implement into treatment workflows, and improve patient outcomes.
Resource Library
This offering serves as a searchable and filterable tool for the health care communities to obtain resources relevant to their needs on their own time. The CO-CARES team vets and maintains the resources accessible to all those in the health care workforce in order to provide the most useful and appropriate information possible. Our goal is to provide health care workers the opportunity to be self-sufficient in finding what they need, without spending additional time and energy conducting the research.
Visit our CDPHE Personalized Resources and Support List to find resources that may be useful to you, or use the filters to narrow down your search. While some resources may be popular with certain audiences, feel free to explore any resource that you think would be helpful.
Social Media Toolkit
The CO-CARES team has compiled various messages for you to post to your organization’s social media networks to promote health care and public health worker well-being and resilience. This toolkit has graphics to share general information about CO-CARES with your staff, posts for CO-CARES programs, and Wellness Snacks. Wellness Snacks are short social posts to promote general wellness for your staff.
Deep Dive Discussions (D3s) for public health
D3s are brisk brain bites to help you explore and engage with the evidence to initiate,
implement, and impact various psychoeducation topics. This document is a resource
for public health professionals to:
- Get an overview of the included psychoeducational topics.
- Learn the details, signs, and symptoms.
- Share links to resources to take action addressing the topics.
While we currently have tailored the packet content for public health workers, we are diligently working on packets for other health settings as well.