Coached by Sue evolved from Sue Cosgrove’s 30+ year history within the healthcare industry. Sue has worn many hats in healthcare and found her greatest alignment to self was in caring for and growing the healthcare workforce.
Sue left her cosy place in the research healthcare world to become a full-time health and wellness coach and create a multi-modal business model to support the healthcare workforce’s health and wellness. Her programs are offered individually and in group settings and delivered face-to-face or online, depending on the client’s location and needs.
Her programs are designed to coach the healthcare workforce to grow their awareness of Compassion Satisfaction and Compassion Fatigue at work. Increased self and team awareness allows this workforce to reflect, explore and experiment with their solutions for compassion satisfaction at work.
Compassion Satisfaction allows individuals and teams in the healthcare workforce to keep their energy, health and wellness so that they can keep turning up and caring for others daily. Compassion Satisfaction awareness enables those who attain it to present themselves fully, as well as their colleagues and clients, daily.
Sue’s network of connections to health departments across Australia allowed the curious nature of creative health jurisdictions to ask how “could health and wellness coaching help the workforce feel well at work?”. Sue used her previous strengths in designing educational materials through needs analysis. She created a program to increase the healthcare workforce’s awareness of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue. The creation of this material came from Sue’s lived experience of living with compassion fatigue over her own healthcare workforce experience throughout her 30-year journey. Through Sue’s networks in healthcare across Australia, she has been able to propose and roll out the delivery of this program to healthcare teams in NSW Health and Queensland Health jurisdictions. She is currently negotiating with some teams at Tasmania Health.
Sue has done this by understanding and negotiating access to workforce funding money being released for state and federal health and wellness programs for the workforce. Sue is now rolling out her fourth iteration of this group coaching program, which has collected data using validated tools to measure how the healthcare workforce feels regarding compassion satisfaction and fatigue in their current workplace situation.
The program takes 3 – 4 months to complete. It is delivered initially as a 4-hour awareness workshop followed by 4 x 40-minute team-driven coaching sessions focused on the topics the team have decided will drive them to focus on Compassion Satisfaction at work. The team focus, and thus their outcomes, is varied as all teams are constructed with unique members from the rich tapestry of life.
To ensure a measurable outcome for health departments, data on the effectiveness of Sue’s work was collected using a validated tool. Data was collected before each of the program’s rollouts, and this data collection method is the gold standard for measuring a program’s effectiveness. Current data has evidenced that her group coaching program intervention has supported an increase in the team’s compassion satisfaction, a decrease in compassion fatigue, and a rise in workforce willingness to stay in their roles for longer (increased workforce retention).
To view some of the resources written by Sue for this program, click here.
Over the last three years, her impact has inspired her to create a new company and a courageous vision for the future. Sue has expanded her program offerings and is adapting her programs to be inclusive for all service industry workforces in 2025 and beyond.
Zest Again will launch on the 1st of April 2025, supporting more healthcare workforces within Australia and New Zealand. Sue will be recruiting health and wellness coaches to work alongside her to deliver the Zest Again programs to all the workforces that want to support healthy workforces.
Sue’s utopic vision is to see her compassion satisfaction awareness program embedded into healthcare teams as part of everyday conversations. Compassion Satisfaction will become a way of life for the future healthcare workforce.
Sue is grateful to have been given many opportunities to use her back catalogue of skills to funnel and create health and wellness programs that use coaching at their core to grow others. Sue has created programs help the service industry workforce reflect, explore and experiment with their new reality on their terms.
Sue admits this is the proudest she has ever been of her work. Sue is grateful for being able to coach and care for the people who turn up tirelessly every day to provide service and care for the Australian community.
