The State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable: Elevating Nurse Voice to Advance Workforce Wellness and Systems Change

The healthcare workforce continues to experience escalating levels of burnout, emotional exhaustion, staffing strain, and psychological distress. The State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable was convened on January 14, 2026 through the Connecticut Nurse Wellness Project (CTNWP) to center nurse voice, elevate lived experience, and examine the systemic conditions influencing nurse wellness across Connecticut and beyond. The roundtable intentionally shifted the conversation beyond individual self-care narratives to focus on staffing, organizational culture, leadership accountability, education, workforce sustainability, and healthcare system design. This publication summarizes findings from the inaugural roundtable, including participation metrics, contributor insights, qualitative discussion themes, live polling data, and emerging statewide priorities for 2026. The roundtable reinforced a central conclusion: nurse wellness is not an individual responsibility alone. It is a workforce, leadership, and systems imperative.

Healthcare systems across the United States continue to experience unprecedented workforce strain driven by burnout, emotional exhaustion, staffing shortages, moral distress, and increasing clinical complexity. Nurses remain at the center of these challenges while simultaneously serving as the foundation of patient care delivery across healthcare environments.

Although conversations surrounding wellness have increased in recent years, many nurses continue to report that wellness initiatives remain episodic, performative, or disconnected from the structural realities shaping their work environments. Increasingly, nurses are identifying staffing instability, workload demands, workplace culture, leadership practices, and psychological safety as the primary determinants of wellness rather than individual coping ability alone.

In response to these concerns, the Connecticut Nurse Wellness Project (CTNWP) convened the inaugural State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable to create a psychologically safe and action-oriented space where nurses and stakeholders could openly discuss the systemic conditions influencing nurse wellness across Connecticut and beyond.

The roundtable served as a foundational step toward a broader statewide effort to elevate nurse voice, gather meaningful data, strengthen partnerships, and inform actionable strategies for workforce wellness and sustainability.

The State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable was convened on January 14, 2026 with the purpose of centering nurse voice, elevating lived experience, and examining the systemic conditions shaping nurse wellness.

The session intentionally moved beyond conversations focused solely on individual self-care and instead explored broader organizational and structural contributors to nurse distress, including staffing, workplace culture, leadership, education, workforce sustainability, and healthcare system design.

The roundtable additionally served as a foundational step in a broader statewide initiative designed to listen directly to nurses across roles, settings, and career stages, identify shared challenges and upstream drivers of distress, and inform statewide data collection, partnerships, and wellness action efforts throughout 2026.

The inaugural State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable demonstrated strong engagement and interest among nurses, educators, leaders, and healthcare stakeholders.

Participation Metrics — Total Registrations: 130. Live Participants: 77. Attendance Rate: 59%. Live Poll Participants: ~40.

High levels of engagement were observed throughout the session via live chat discussion, polling participation, reflective dialogue, and contributor discussion.

The strong participation and sustained engagement reflected significant readiness among nurses and stakeholders to engage in statewide dialogue and action surrounding nurse wellness and workforce sustainability.

The roundtable intentionally incorporated perspectives from multiple sectors across the nursing ecosystem to ensure broad representation and interdisciplinary dialogue. Contributors included:

Dr. Tory Murtha, Director of Patient Services Ambulatory Oncology at Yale New Haven Hospital.

Dr. Maria Krol, Executive Director of Healthcare Programs at Southern Connecticut State University.

Dr. Tina Loarte-Ridriguez, Executive Director at Connecticut Center for Nursing Workforce.

Dr. Stacy Bentil, Director of Nursing Services at the Connecticut Department of Children & Families and CEO of Bentil Healthcare Consulting.

Tanya Abreu.

Dr. Wendy Garvin Mayo, Founder of the Connecticut Nurse Wellness Project and Creator of the State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable.

The diversity of contributors revealed strong alignment regarding the core challenges impacting nurse wellness across healthcare settings.

1. Nurse Wellness Is a Systems Issue — Contributors consistently emphasized that nurse wellness is shaped primarily by structural and systemic conditions rather than individual resilience alone. Unsafe staffing models, unrealistic workloads, operational pressures, and organizational decisions were repeatedly identified as major drivers of nurse distress, burnout, and disengagement. Participants emphasized that wellness cannot be separated from how care is organized, how staffing decisions are made, how leadership functions, and how nurses are treated within healthcare systems.

2. Safe Staffing Is the Foundation of Wellness — Staffing emerged as the strongest and most consistent theme throughout the discussion. Contributors described chronic understaffing and increasing patient acuity as contributors to cognitive overload, emotional exhaustion, moral distress, patient safety concerns, and workforce instability. Participants repeatedly emphasized that wellness initiatives become ineffective when staffing conditions remain unsafe.

3. Moral Distress and Misaligned Accountability — Participants described growing frustration related to being held accountable for outcomes shaped by operational and policy decisions outside their control. Themes included reimbursement pressures, budget limitations, unrealistic expectations, and disconnect between frontline realities and executive decision-making. Many contributors emphasized that nurses are not leaving the profession because they no longer care, but because they can no longer practice in alignment with their professional values.

4. Culture and Psychological Safety Matter — Contributors consistently identified organizational culture as a major determinant of daily nurse experience. Themes included lack of psychological safety, bullying and lateral violence, martyrdom culture within nursing, and stigma surrounding mental health and wellness support. Participants emphasized that wellness is reflected not simply through wellness programming, but through how nurses are treated during moments of stress, vulnerability, and error.

5. Leadership Accountability Is Essential — Strong consensus emerged that wellness must be actively owned by leadership rather than delegated solely to human resources departments or optional wellness programming. Participants emphasized the importance of leaders modeling healthy behaviors and boundaries, shared governance structures with meaningful authority, and linking leadership performance to wellness and engagement outcomes.

6. Education–Practice Misalignment — Contributors discussed a growing disconnect between nursing education environments and real-world clinical practice. While nursing programs may increasingly incorporate wellness support and emotional resources, many participants noted that those supports often disappear once nurses transition into professional practice environments. Participants emphasized the need to better prepare nurses for healthcare realities, integrate communication and leadership development, and strengthen wellness support throughout transition-to-practice experiences.

7. Nurses Must Help Design the Future of Healthcare — Participants strongly emphasized that nurses must be active participants in healthcare system redesign, policy development, innovation, and workforce strategy. Contributors warned that excluding nurses from leadership and systems design risks reducing nursing to labor rather than leadership, diminishing professional judgment, and eroding the human-centered foundation of care delivery.

Live chat discussion reinforced and amplified the primary themes identified during contributor dialogue.

Strong engagement emerged around staffing shortages and workload, frustration with superficial wellness efforts, psychological safety, kindness and respect, shared governance, leadership accountability, inclusion of all nursing roles, and the need for measurable wellness outcomes.

One particularly resonant phrase repeated throughout the discussion was: “Pizza is not wellness.” Participants used this phrase symbolically to express frustration with wellness efforts perceived as superficial or disconnected from structural workplace realities.

The chat discussion reflected both urgency and solidarity, with participants expressing appreciation for a space where honest and transparent dialogue was welcomed.

How Nurse Wellness Is Currently Viewed — Recognized as important but inconsistently supported: 43%. Discussed, but mostly left to individual nurses: 21%. Rarely discussed or prioritized: 14%. Embedded into leadership decisions and workflows: 12%. These findings suggest that while awareness of wellness exists, relatively few participants experience wellness as structurally integrated into leadership and operational decision-making.

Greatest Barrier to Advancing Nurse Wellness — Staffing shortages and workload: 43%. Organizational culture: 20%. Leadership alignment and accountability: 18%. Participants consistently reinforced that chronic understaffing leaves nurses with limited capacity for recovery, reflection, or participation in wellness efforts.

Priority Areas for Statewide Action — Workforce and staffing sustainability: 27%. Psychological safety and culture: 27%. Leadership accountability and decision-making: 20%. Findings reinforced the understanding that staffing sustainability, culture, and leadership accountability must be addressed collectively to create meaningful improvement in nurse wellness.

Based on roundtable findings, three major priorities emerged for statewide action moving forward.

1. Launch the Statewide Nurse Wellness Survey — To systematically capture nurses' lived experiences across Connecticut and translate findings into actionable workforce and policy data.

2. Launch Statewide WenWell™ Support Circles — To create psychologically safe spaces where nurses and nursing students can connect, reflect, and receive support while broader systems-level efforts continue.

3. Strengthen Statewide Partnerships — To collaborate across healthcare organizations, academic institutions, workforce groups, and community stakeholders so nurse wellness becomes a shared statewide responsibility.

The State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable revealed strong alignment across nurses, educators, leaders, and stakeholders regarding the systemic nature of workforce wellness challenges.

Participants consistently emphasized that wellness cannot be separated from staffing, leadership, culture, operational structure, and healthcare system design.

Importantly, contributors and participants alike expressed a desire to move beyond symbolic or performative wellness efforts toward measurable and sustainable workforce strategies centered on psychological safety, nurse voice, leadership accountability, and structural reform.

The roundtable also reinforced the importance of creating spaces where nurses feel psychologically safe to speak honestly about their lived experiences, emotional realities, and workforce concerns.

The State of Nurse Wellness™ Roundtable affirmed a central truth: the health of the healthcare system is inseparable from the health of the nurses within it.

Across roles, settings, and career stages, nurses spoke openly about the conditions shaping their capacity, safety, connection, and ability to sustainably remain within the profession.

Participants identified not only what is currently broken, but also what is possible when listening becomes intentional, leadership becomes accountable, and healthcare systems are designed with nurses rather than solely around operational demands.

This convening marked the beginning of a sustained, data-informed, nurse-centered movement focused on improving the environments in which nurses learn, work, lead, and care.

The State of Nurse Wellness™ movement reinforces a central principle: Nurse wellness is not a perk. It is a workforce, leadership, and systems imperative.