Making Time for Care: How Leadership Turns Support Groups from “Extra” to Essential
By Liz Friedman, CEO & Co-Founder of GPS Group Peer Support
In every healthcare setting, time is the tightest currency. Staff move from crisis to crisis, schedules overflow, and anything that isn’t urgent is pushed aside. In that reality, support groups, no matter how meaningful, can easily be dismissed as “nice to have” rather than essential.
Yet across conversations I’m having with leadership teams at healthcare organizations throughout the state of Massachusetts, one message keeps surfacing: The emotional burden on the workforce has reached a breaking point. Leaders understand the crisis. They see the burnout, the moral injury, the turnover. And they recognize that unless something changes, no amount of recruitment or restructuring will stabilize their teams.
What many leaders also acknowledge is that when support programs are optional, they are rarely utilized. Not because staff don’t want them, but because the structure of healthcare work makes it nearly impossible to prioritize their own wellbeing unless leadership makes it a clear and protected expectation.
Time Pressure Is Real. Leadership Pressure Matters More.
Staff consistently share that they feel like they never have enough time, and that is often true. Even when support is offered, daily demands win: the waiting room is full, documentation is behind, someone else is out sick. Without structural permission, support becomes something done “if there’s time,” which means it doesn’t happen.
Again and again, leadership teams are recognizing that culture shifts only happen when leaders set expectations. When an organization says, “We are offering support groups throughout the year, and we expect every staff member to attend,” everything changes. Participation becomes normalized rather than exceptional. Staff feel permission rather than guilt. And the shared buy-in creates a level of engagement that optional programs have never achieved.
Safety Requires Structure—and Leadership Sets the Tone
Support groups require emotional safety. Staff may be hesitant to share openly around colleagues, especially in culturally diverse environments or in small, close-knit departments. Without leadership naming confidentiality, modeling participation, and building trust in the process, many staff will hold back.
Leadership sets the tone by:
• Validating that stress and burnout are real, not personal failures
• Signaling that seeking support is encouraged, not stigmatized
• Ensuring accessible formats—whether multilingual, culturally attuned, or department-specific
• Acknowledging that emotional health is inseparable from quality care
In environments where leaders embrace this, support groups stop feeling risky and start feeling grounding.
From Wellness Add-On to Organizational Infrastructure
When leadership frames support groups as central rather than supplemental, several things consistently happen across organizations:
• Burnout decreases
• Staff morale and retention improve
• Cross-department communication strengthens
• And caregiving becomes more sustainable
Just as important: Staff who experience group support firsthand become better prepared to bring relational, culturally relevant group care into their work with patients and families. The benefits ripple outward.
Support groups stop being “programming” and start becoming part of the organizational DNA.
A Necessary Shift for a Workforce in Crisis
Again and again, leadership teams across hospitals, health centers, specialty practices, and behavioral health organizations are naming the same truth that their workforce cannot keep carrying trauma, stress, and emotional demand without structures of care in place.
The shift now required is cultural, not logistical.
Healthcare organizations must begin treating staff mental health—and structured group support specifically—as essential, not optional. As core infrastructure, not a wellness extra. As a prerequisite for sustainable care, not a reward for those with free time.
When leaders protect time, pay staff to participate, and normalize support as part of the job, they transform what is possible inside their institutions.
They make clear that caring for patients begins with caring for the people who care for them.
And when that shift happens, support groups don’t just help individuals, they strengthen entire organizations.
Bring MASStrong to Your Workplace
GPS’s MASStrong program offers free GPS trainings, support groups, curriculums, and toolkits for Massachusetts medical, behavioral health, and community care workers and organizations. Eligible organizations can also apply for GPS partnership support and grants up to $10,000.
