The Nurse Founder of WeCare Boxes Turned Grief Into Support for Nurses

Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm. 

The evening after Christa Rymal, BSN, RN, founder and CEO of WeCare, and her coworkers attended the funeral and burial of a nurse colleague who had lost her life to suicide, they were assigned to work, only to discover their unit was short-staffed. The painful irony of returning to conditions that many suspected had led to their colleague's death was not lost on Rymal, but she steeled herself to face management and request another nurse to get through the shift.

The response was one echoed in countless nurses ' faces: sorry, but no. You'll just have to deal with it. 

Despite watching their colleague be buried only hours ago, Rymal, as the charge nurse, and her team were forced to work short-staffed and were only acknowledged when HR sent them pizza later that night. 

A cold slice of pizza and a dead colleague were certainly not the only wake-up calls that Rymal faced in her long career as a nurse, but it was a pivotal turning point in her realizing that something needed to change, and fast. 

Being the Caring Change

While the change didn't happen overnight, the seeds were being planted, and somewhere over the course of Rymal's over 25-year career in nursing, she began to develop the idea of a way to care for the very people responsible for caring for others, often without a break, recognition, or support.

After a few different stents in the wellness and entrepreneurial spaces, Rymal founded the We Care Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on holistic care for nurses and healthcare professionals through four avenues:

• Well-being boxes, filled with wellness products and access to virtual wellness courses
• Full-scale wellness conferences
• Immersive self-care retreats
• Membership opportunities

One of the key pillars of the We Care Foundation is the We Care boxes, which individual nurses can purchase for self-care, or hospitals or managers can gift to their staff, such as for Nurses' Week or special occasions. 

The boxes were born out of reflection from a career spent watching her team members sacrifice, even to the ultimate degree. 

"It was just this horrific awakening of, why are we so good at seeing things in patients and so neglectful at seeing things in ourselves?" she notes. "Like, why have we created this culture in healthcare where we feel like we have a disassociation from ever being people who have our own needs around health and well-being?"

The We Care Foundation doesn't shy away from the hard facts, like:

• 50% of healthcare workers report burnout
• Female nurses have an 18X higher rate of suicide than any other profession
• The U.S. is predicted to be 450,000 nurses short by next year
• 50% of nurses plan to leave the profession in the next 1-3 years

And while the sobering reality of what nurses are faced with can be difficult to absorb, Rymal is passionate about making a difference where we can.

"Our boxes are to recognize healthcare professionals for what they're doing and what they're giving, the things that they see that most people just can't comprehend, and we're doing it in a way that also fills their cup back up, in healthy ways," she explains. "Healthcare professionals are generally speaking, in a total neglect of themselves to take care of others. So we want them to feel recognized and cared for in a very different capacity."

Transforming Healthcare, One Box at a Time

As a longtime bedside nurse, manager, and administrator herself, Rymal is well aware that no amount of wellness boxes or products can fix the very real systemic issues that face the nursing and healthcare industries.

But still, she believes that the message—and the mission—matters, because nurses need to first believe that they matter enough for change to happen. 

"I think if we can start to shift that culture, that we're not going to keep abusing and neglecting and ignoring and shoving these conversations under the rug, I think you're going to see nurses show up in much bigger numbers, in much different ways," Ryman explains. "We're giving a message that we're starting to shift the conversation to say we care about you as much as we care about the people we're serving, as much as we care about the bottom line."

"That's where I think it has to start," she adds. "That's where nurses are. I don't pretend that we have all the answers, and I don't pretend that we can solve all the systemic problems, but I think if we can tackle this one-on-one, I think we can start to change the culture. I really do."

Leading the Way

Rymal also points out that conversations about how to properly care for nurses are needed at all levels, including leadership. She explains that after the loss of her colleague and the ensuing short-staffed shift, she met with leadership to explain how the situation could have been handled better and the challenges nurses were facing with trauma and a lack of support. 

"While I can't say it solved all the problems, what I learned in that process is that some of the managers didn't know what to do either," she says. "You know, we always want to assume that leadership has all the answers and they know how to handle things perfectly. But at the end of the day, I got zero training on how to look for burnout signs in myself or my colleagues. And you know what? They didn't get any either."

The We Care Foundation is for all nurses and healthcare professionals, but the organization does offer women's care retreats, which Rymal says can be helpful, as many female nurses—who make up the majority of the profession—can struggle more than their male counterparts with things like burnout and boundaries.

"I think healthcare just tends to draw in, you know, caregivers and people who tend to be a little more altruistic and self-sacrificing," she notes. "So then it's almost like healthcare systems, intentionally or unintentionally, kind of prey on that. It's good that we don't know how to set boundaries. It's great that we don't know how to say no. It's great that we'll do everything for everybody else at the cost of us…until it's not."

A New Look at Nursing

Aside from the laser-clear message of caring and compassion the We Care Boxes send, each box also contains a full CME credit. Each box is specifically designed to solve a pain point for health professionals, and the boxes can even be purchased with CME dollars. (If you're not sure if your organization offers CME dollars for you to spend, Rymal encourages you to check: "Nurses tend to have more CME dollars than they realize!" she says.)

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There are a few different ways the We Care boxes can be utilized: 

• Individual nurses can purchase a We Care boxto support their own self-care
• Gifting a box to another healthcare professional
• Through a monthly subscription to send or receive a We Care box monthly (there are new themed boxes every month)
• Nurse managers or administrators can purchase bulk orders for their units or hospitals
• Donors can sponsor boxes for local hospitals or units
• Through "mini boxes" that managers or donors can order for Nurses' Week
• With an upcoming "Mobile We Care Cart" stocked with wellness goodies for the entire unit

The boxes are different each month, but they all contain a CME credit via a virtual course and themed wellness products. They have everything from an endocrinology teaching on how to support immune health to a trauma debriefing nurse discussing how to heal from trauma. Plus, there are evergreen boxes, like the 'Nursing Student' gift box or the 'Founder's Favorites,' featuring Rymal's most-loved products. 

If you're a nurse looking to purchase a We Care box for yourself, a friend, or a loved one this holiday season, the foundation is offering Nurse.org readers 10% off any box with the code NURSEORG.

Rymal is the first one to admit that there are "a million" worthy non-profits in the world, but that We Care is one of the few that has the potential to impact every single person in our country. 

"Every single human is going to be impacted by the shortages that we're having in healthcare," she points out. "It's going to collectively impact all of us, and it's going to collectively take our whole society saying that we want something better and different."

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"I think nurses are starting to shift that conversation to say, 'Yeah, we're not okay,'" she continues. "We're still caring for people, but we really don't know how to care for ourselves, nor do we have time or space or tools to do it."

"Nurses are the drivers," she adds. "I think we always have been. We're the leaders, the influencers who get to work with everybody. We do all the things: we're advocatingfor the patients, for the families, for the care. We talk to everybody in the mix. Nurses are incredibly powerful, and I think it is time that we use our voices in powerful ways."

Use code NURSEORG to get 10% off any We Care box. And be sure to follow the We Care Foundation on Instagram and Facebook.

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