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.
Connect with CO-CARES
Want to learn more? Schedule a virtual meeting via Google Meet with the CO-CARES team. We have time slots spanning from 10 to 45 minutes. If you are unable to meet any of the times listed in the calendar, we are happy to set a time that would work best for you. We can accommodate conversations in multiple languages. To request accommodations for specific offerings or trainings, or for questions about accessibility, email cdphe_healthcareworkersupport@state.co.us.
Past the Pandemic
Canvas course
Past the Pandemic: Individual Wellbeing, Connection & Support offers space to connect and interact with other health care and public health workers on topics of stress, burnout, grief, connection, mindfulness, role management, and more. This self-paced course, led by mental health professionals, helps you process and validate your experiences, build a common language of stress, and learn tools to mitigate stress injury. The course modules will include short videos, optional reflection exercises, interactive features such as live polls, and more. You will be invited as a student into this course and be able to access the material and resources in your own time.
Topics include:
- Stress and the Human Machine: Impact of Stress on Mind, Body & Living a Life You Love
- Digging Deeper: How the Biology of Stress Informs Burnout Prevention
- Managing Grief and Finding Meaning
- Connection: Strengthening Relationships and Support
- Stress Management: Prioritizing Sleep and Calming Practices
- Using Mindfulness in Everyday Life
This course also offers an optional Track for Leaders with guidance for how to integrate these tools into your workplace and teams. Participants are also invited to join weekly Resource Rooms on targeted topics to connect and share experiences, and also have access to the free Past the Pandemic Toolkit that aligns with the series content.
Toolkit
The Past the Pandemic Toolkit is a self-paced fillable PDF. It was built to accompany the PTP series with additional exercises, worksheets, opportunities for reflection, and a rich resource list with active links. It is designed to be a guide to use alongside the video modules, but can also be shared with others in your teams and organizations to spread knowledge, as a stand alone resource.
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.
Psychological First Aid is built on the concept of human resilience created by the National Center for PTSD and the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. This two-hour training, open to all health care workers, uses an evidence-informed approach to help you better recognize, understand, and mitigate symptoms of psychological distress among people of any age or background. PFA trainings are held virtually on the second Tuesday of each month from 9am-11am and participants will receive PFA training certification.
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.
Switchback Institute is dedicated to individuals, teams, and organizations doing high impact, high stakes work. Switchback champions individuals, teams, and organizational leadership in engineering environments that promote individual and team resilience, connectedness, and effectiveness. Workshops are designed to be interactive and participant centered. They are customized to meet the needs of individuals and achieve agency-identified outcomes. Group sessions are no-fault, strengths-based, collaborative, and fun!
The Switchback program includes participation in a recovery retreat, an assessment of team intelligence leading to a team development plan, and team coaching to achieve self-identified goals. By the end of the program, you will have the tools needed to sustain consistent professional growth and resilience, both individually and collectively. Most importantly, we want your teams to be reunited with the passion that took them into the health care field. Participation is restricted to local public health agencies or medical organizations (e.g., critical access hospitals, clinical practices, federally qualified health centers) without financial resources necessary to pay for similar experiences. Priority will be given to those in rural and frontier counties.
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.
We created short and long versions, 30 minutes and 1 hour respectively, of each topic to accommodate your needs. We can do multiple workshops in one day and can also provide drop-in workshops throughout the day if different teams have varying availability. Contact CO-CARES to schedule workshops for your team or organization.
Topics for Resilience Workshops include:
Burnout
Crisis management
Compassion fatigue
General wellbeing
Grief and loss
Mindfulness
Recreation, relaxing, and recharging
Resiliency
Stress management
Sleep
Workplace culture
Workplace violence
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.
TRAILS
The Team of Resilient Ambassadors Innovating and Leading Support and Sustainability (TRAILS) is a Peer Champion development program seeking out team members who want to learn more about team and organizational wellness, as well as act in a Peer Champion role within these teams. TRAILS Ambassadors strive to develop Peer Champion skills, facilitate connections with health care and public health workers across the state, and collaborate with their own team members to promote a culture of wellness, resilience, and recovery.
TRAILS puts structure to CO-CARES programs that are already offered individually and in turn creates a tiered curriculum that addresses various Peer Champion skills such as social support and response in times of stress. Additionally, TRAILS hosts monthly Ambassador Assemblies where Ambassadors can connect with us and each other, learn valuable supplemental information shared by guest subject matter experts, and receive additional resources.
Sign up for TRAILS.
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.
Health Links®, Total Worker Health® Program
Health Links® is a program that champions health and safety at work. We offer evidence-based Healthy Workplace Certification and one-on-one advising to help organizations and team members achieve Total Worker Health®— a holistic approach to worker well-being that enhances safety, health, and productivity. Health Links® offers a Workplace Mental Health Module which includes an organizational survey, toolkit, customized recommendations, and advising to help improve employee mental health and resiliency.
Based in the Center for Health, Work & Environment at the Colorado School of Public Health, our deep experience as researchers and industry trailblazers informs everything we do for you. Health Links® make it our mission to further your vision of a healthier, safer workplace. Email CO-CARES if your organization is interested in doing Health Links® to get the free voucher code.
Colorado Center for the Advancement of Patient Safety (CCAPS)
Colorado Hospital Association (CHA) has partnered with CO-CARES to support Colorado hospitals around the important issue of health care worker wellness and resilience. Through this partnership, CHA offers a robust resilience and well-being training and education program tailored specifically for hospitals and for all health care workers. As part of this program, CHA will host 10 virtual sessions during the upcoming year, covering a variety of topics centered around health care worker wellbeing and resilience that will be led by nationally recognized health care wellness experts. This learning collaborative will identify and share evidence-based frameworks and national best practices, resulting in a final report including recommendations for future work and next steps as a state.
CHA is the leading voice of the Colorado hospital and health system community. Representing more than 100 hospitals and health systems throughout the state, CHA serves as a trusted, credible, and reliable resource on health issues, hospital data, and trends for its members, media, policymakers, and the general public. Through CHA, Colorado’s hospitals and health systems work together in a shared commitment to improve health and health care in Colorado.
All sessions will be held from noon – 1 p.m.
- Workforce Well-being: A New Leadership Imperative | Thursday, Oct. 17
- Measurement Approaches to Understand the Problem and Track Meaningful Change | Thursday, Nov. 7
- Trauma-Informed Care Approaches to Decrease Organizational Stress | Thursday, Dec. 5
- Cultural Transformation and Well-being, Part 1: Culture Drivers to Enhance Well-being | Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025
- Cultural Transformation and Well-being, Part 2: Culture Drivers to Enhance Well-being | Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025
- Redesigning Daily Work for Well-being, Part 1: Team/Process-based Workflows | Thursday, Feb. 13, 2025
- Redesigning Daily Work for Well-being, Part 2: Digital Workflows | Thursday, March 13, 2025
- Panel with Well-being Leaders: Designing Operational Strategy | Thursday, April 10, 2025
- Panel Discussion: Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Thursday, May 1, 2025
- Workforce Safety: Dealing with Workplace Violence, Workplace Safety, and the Connection to Well-being in Health Care | Thursday, May 15, 2025
Register for sessions.
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. Furthermore, the CO-CARES team can be contacted directly to connect workers in the health care field to suitable resources from either the resource library or a custom search option. 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)
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.