New Houston-based app Nurseify is designed to offer wellness assistance to nurses.

For the past two years, healthcare workers and nurses have been at the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic. With increased hours and decreased flexibility, nurses are struggling with mental health issues and burnout. Travel and relief nurses, shuffled from facility to facility, face complicated scheduling and wage issues.

New Houston-based app Nurseify was designed to address the strain and burnout of nurses by offering a new approach to staffing and self care. The free app benefits relief nurses through its scheduling features, but it also serves as a multi-faceted wellness app for permanently staffed nurses. Some of the largest Houston area hospitals are located in Katy, including Houston Methodist West, Memorial Hermann West, Texas Children’s West and MD Anderson West.

Nurseify also offers legal advice, finance and accounting support, wellness counseling, physical training and job training resources to nurses.

Benjamin Foster, Nurseify CEO, was inspired to launch the app following Hurricane Harvey in 2017. He was working in human resources for Houston hospital systems at the time, and part of his job was trying to shuffle relief nurses through the hospital systems to offer respite for nurses that had been working constantly. The nurses had no autonomy over their schedules and were often working weeks on end without a break.

When the pandemic hit, the need for travel and relief nurses reached critical levels, and Foster realized that the problem had only intensified since Harvey, so he created Nurseify. Nurses can use the app to set their own schedules and wages at the facilities of their choice.

“What we want to be able to do is really kind of eliminate that middleman and the traditional staffing agency model and really empower nurses to set their own availability and schedules and rates on the platform,” Foster said. “We want to empower nurses to be able to take ownership of their work.”

One of the app’s most popular features is “Wellness Wednesday,” said Rama Walker, Nurseify CNO. Each Wednesday, Nurseify presents a new speaker on a nursing related subject. “We have different speakers that come on just to give tips and advice and guidance on all the things that impact nurses,” Walker said.

The app also features live events for Houston-area nurses.

In honor of Nurses Month, on May 31, Nurseify will be facilitating a continuing education webinar on PTSD that nurses may attend to receive continuing education credits. The webinar will be done in partnership with the University of Houston College of Nursing.

“It's free for the nurses to attend and to participate in, and it really addresses the trauma that nurses have experienced over the last few years due to COVID and how taxing it has been on their personal life,” Walker said.

Nurseify also promotes legislation that supports nurses, Foster said. “We work with our Congressional representatives to discuss legislation that we believe is nurse-friendly,” he said. “We want to see greater protections for nurses when they're in the facility, and one of our biggest priorities is to make abuse against nurses the same protections that (police) officers receive.”

By creating a platform that supports and unifies nurses, Foster hopes Nurseify can revolutionize the way the healthcare industry operates on a whole. “We're thinking about the whole nurse and the whole healthcare system by making it easy for nurses to do things they were once unable to do,” Foster said. “Technology can help make the whole process more efficient while empowering nurses, and that’s what we’re here to do."