About Lacey Sapkiewicz
Lacey Sapkiewicz is the Senior Vice President of Operations, Trinity Health Ann Arbor and Livingston. She also serves on the board for Girls on the Run of Southeastern Michigan.
Resources
Trinity Health Ann Arbor Campus Natural Areas
Transcription
Rebekah Warren: From the health of our rivers and wetlands to the air we breathe and the places where we live, our environment can have a profound impact on our health. But what if the environment could actually become part of the prescription for better individual health? This is Issues of the Environment on 89.1 WEMU. I'm Rebekah Warren. Today, we're looking at a pretty remarkable example of that idea right here in Washtenaw County. Trinity Health Ann Arbor has a 340-acre campus in Superior Township along the Huron River. And within that campus are 103 acres of natural areas, including wetlands, forests, and unusual prairie ecosystem, that are now undergoing a major restoration. The hospital is calling this its :Hospital Without Walls: Nature as Medicine" project, an effort to connect environmental restoration, public health, and access to nature. Joining me today to talk about it is Lacey Sapkiewicz, Senior Vice President of Operations for Trinity Health in Arbor and Livingston. Lacey, welcome to Issues of the Environment!
Lacey Sapkiewicz: Thank you so much for having me!
Rebekah Warren: Lacey, I think when many of us picture a hospital, we think of the building, the patient rooms, operating tables, beeping monitors and medical equipment and all very highly controlled environments inside a hospital building. So, what does it mean to think about a hospital extending beyond those walls and actually incorporating surrounding natural landscape into its approach for health?
Lacey Sapkiewicz: That's a great question! And Trinity Health Ann Arbor is so uniquely situated in that we are on 340 beautiful acres. So, yes, when you come onto our campus, you will notice the big buildings and the typical medical center locations and units that you would expect. But you will also notice that there's lots and lots of green space. We have the Border-to-Border trail that weaves throughout our natural and mature forest and wetlands. It's really quite a remarkable campus. So, when we think of a total health when it comes to a human, we like to think of what you can approach through traditional medicine in the hospital walls, but we also think about the mental and physical health that comes from being in green spaces. So, our goal with our Hospital Without Walls project is to really optimize the space that we get to sit on the privilege of the land that we have available to us to make it easier to use and to even just create more awareness that it exists for not only our colleagues, those that work here at the hospital, but for our local community who live close and are here in Ypsilanti Township to ensure they're aware of the various trails and spaces that we here for their use.
Rebekah Warren: Lacey, was there a particular moment or a realization that prompted Trinity Health to look at these 340 acres differently as an asset for both environmental conservation and community health?
Lacey Sapkiewicz: You know, I feel like it was part of even just the original idea of why the hospital moved originally from downtown Ann Arbor to this space was just that linkage to help for green spaces and how they contribute to one's mental and physical health. I would say the most recent restoration projects were prompted most likely after the pandemic where, during the COVID pandemic, we had to kind of slow down some resources that were allocated towards kind of the normal preservation work that we would do in just the timing of having to focus all things around COVID at the time. So, since then, some areas went into a little bit more disrepair. We received some community feedback around some of the trails not being as accessible or as safe. So, that definitely prompted our senior leadership team here in Ann Arbor to think about and reassess how we could get back to devoting some resources to make the natural spaces more accessible and more safe for youth. And actually, we have a really wonderful team within our grants and philanthropic department. And so, we actually received just under a $400,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, which is allowing us to restore 103 acres of our natural and recreational areas here on campus. And our goal to do that is to improve community health and especially, again, serving our underserved neighborhoods that are nearby, but also being a resource for our physicians and nurses and everyone that works here on-campus to have a space that they can go and de-stress during their day or even before or after.
Rebekah Warren: You're listening to Issues of the Environment on 89.1 WEMU. I'm Rebekah Warren. We're talking today about Trinity Health's "Hospital Without Walls: Nature as Medicine" Initiative, which is restoring 103 acres of natural areas on the hospital's campus and connecting environmental, restoration, and community health. Lacey, it seems there's a growing body of research that shows that spending time in nature can improve mood, reduce anxiety and stress, and help relieve mental fatigue. And this campus, as you said, already has about 2.5 miles of walking trails that connect with Washtenaw County's Border-to-Border Trails. Can you share what you're thinking about how these trails and natural areas can serve as a health resource for patients, hospital staff, and not only those visiting or providing health care, but the broader community as well?
Lacey Sapkiewicz: Yes. Our goal in restoring the trails, removing invasive species and making the natural areas just more user-friendly is intended to be exactly that: a safe space that allows our community, internally and externally, to go out into nature. We know that it is a de-stressor, and one of the greatest issues that we're facing in healthcare currently is burnout. We have staffing shortages in many different areas. You hear about kind of nursing and physician shortages that we have in many specialties in areas. And part of that, oftentimes, leads to increased stress during the day. We have our patients who are sicker and staying with us longer, so we have individuals who are coming to work in a very stressful climate and environment. Our goal in thinking about kind of the whole being, not only for our patient care, is to look at our colleagues and how we are taking care of them and giving them resources that allows them to live a more balanced life. Now, we can't always take away the stresses that occur during the work day, but we can embolden other opportunities and ways in which we can provide them with tools to able to address the stress that they incur during their work day. So, many of our colleagues have not been aware of the availability of the walking trails on site. So, part of it has been just creating a campaign to make sure that they increase their awareness. So, we're trying to provide as much information and education about the availability of these spaces as well, which is a key component to making this successful.
Rebekah Warren: There's an important part of this project that I think is particularly interesting for an environmental audience. This isn't simply about creating another place to take a walk. The wetlands, prairie, and other natural areas are also helping manage stormwater coming off of a very large, high-traffic medical campus with roofs, parking lots, and all the impervious surfaces that come with a hospital. We know that that is an important buffer to protect the Huron River from runoff. Can you tell us a little bit about what kinds of nutrients or contaminants you're particularly interested in helping keep out of the Huron River with this project?
Lacey Sapkiewicz: Because we are such a large health care organization and safety is an utmost concern, we do use and utilize a lot of salt, especially, as you can imagine, in the winter months, so really creating buffers for making sure that that salt runoff doesn't enter the Huron River has been an area of focus for us. Actually, because we are such a large organization, we have so many spaces, parking lots, etc. that we do salt. We do even store salt here on campus, so that is an area that we focused on specifically to ensure that the runoff we are putting in and that the right buffers to minimize that impact, because, again, after doing some assessment, we learned that our runoff was quite increased over the years. And so, putting in those improvements to ensure that those were addressed was a high-focus impact of this work as well.
Rebekah Warren: We do a lot of work on this program to connect public health and environmental protection. I know some people think those two are separate issues, but clean water, functioning wetlands, healthy ecosystems, opportunities to exercise outdoors and access to natural spaces can all affect the health of the people who live around them. Has any part of this project changed the way that you think in the healthcare system about what providing this healthcare actually means?
Lacey Sapkiewicz: It's really deepened my commitment around public health. Because, as you indicated, public health is so multimodal. There are so many influencers of health. And as a healthcare institution and an anchor institution in this community, I think it's our role to consider all of the different factors that impact health at the end of the day. So, natural areas is not a typical area that you would hear a hospital talking about. And that's what I love about Trinity's involvement here is that we are looking at the holistic view of a human's health, and we see the positive impact that natural areas will have not only on today's generation, but future. And we're also looking at it from a workforce standpoint, making sure that we're developing teams and volunteers that are educated in habitat restoration for the future.
Rebekah Warren: Lacey, thank you for joining us and helping us understand how restoring a natural area can also be an investment in community health. Lacey Sapkiewicz is Senior Vice President of Operations at Trinity Health Ann Arbor in Livingston. For more information on our conversation today, visit our website at WEMU.org. Issues of the environment is produced in partnership with the Office of the Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner, and you hear it here every Wednesday. I'm Rebekah Warren, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU, Ypsilanti.
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