Tim Cunningham, RN, DrPH, FAAN is Co-Chief Well-Being Officer at Emory Healthcare and the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University. He holds a joint appointment as adjunct associate professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory Healthcare and serves as Vice President of Practice and Innovation for Emory Healthcare. He collaborates with interprofessional teams to support structural and systemic well-being change for healthcare staff and professionals, university staff and faculty, researchers, learners, and community members. In this conversation we speak with Tim about his recent appointment with the Office of Well-Being (called EmWELL) in Emory University’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which includes Emory Healthcare. The office will serve as a central resource for designing and implementing well-being programs that address the current environmental stressors among clinicians, health professionals, faculty and staff in clinical, research and academic health sciences areas. As Tim says, the office will serve all - "from valets to vascular surgeons, from anesthesiologists to zoologists". The leaders in healthcare have been working on creating this office for years, especially after recognizing the need in The Blue Ridge Academic Health Group report of 2018, which concluded: “It is clear that the ‘healing’ of caregivers cannot be accomplished solely through ‘self-help.’ Just as the best care for patients is achieved through teamwork and support, addressing the challenges of burnout and advancing the wellness of health care providers will also require leadership and institutional commitment to achieve optimal results.” We talk about burnout, and the need to move past talking about it, and start working through it. We talk about leaders being called to take meaningful, calculated and evidence-based risks. We talk about vulnerability. Tim shares other strategies for defining the organizational and interpersonal well-being, and designing the pathway for getting there. Tune in to the full conversation to learn about this exciting, timely and inspiring work! This podcast is brought to you by Emory Lifestyle Medicine & Wellness. To learn more about our work, please visit https://bit.ly/EmoryLM
Tim Cunningham, RN, DrPH, FAAN is Co-Chief Well-Being Officer at Emory Healthcare and the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University. He holds a joint appointment as adjunct associate professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory Healthcare and serves as Vice President of Practice and Innovation for Emory Healthcare. He collaborates with interprofessional teams to support structural and systemic well-being support change for healthcare staff and professionals, university staff and faculty, researchers, learners, and community members. His clinical background is emergency nursing, however, he never thought that he would become a nurse.
Cunningham’s first passion was in the performing arts—theatre, clown, dance and acrobatics. He worked as an actor for nearly a decade in various regional theatres in the U.S. and internationally. It was because of those experiences that he began work with Clowns Without Borders in 2003. A small non-profit organization, Clowns Without Borders sends professional artists into war zones, refugee camps and other zones of crisis with the simple mission of catalyzing laughter and playfulness. Tim has performed in more than 20 countries with the clowns, he served for five years as the Executive Director of CWB, and now he sits on their Board of Directors. It was working in a pediatric ward in pre-earthquake Haiti that inspired Tim to study nursing.
He graduated from the Clinical Nurse Leader program at the University of Virginia in 2009 and then worked an emergency/trauma nurse at the UVA Health, Children’s National Medical Center and New York Presbyterian, Cornell. Tim completed his Doctorate of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University in 2016. His dissertation focused on psychosocial support of expatriate Ebola aid workers in West Africa, with an emphasis on Narrative Medicine. He then joined the faculty at UVA with a joint appointment in the School of Nursing and Department of Drama.
Tim is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. His publications focus on compassion and well-being. Tim’s co-authored textbook, Self-Care for New and Student Nurses challenges the way we as learners and leaders approach the critical practices of caring for ourselves that we may care for others.
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