A last-minute addition of wellness sessions made all the difference
When going to and from session to session during an event, it’s easy for attendees to neglect themselves: not being mindful of what they eat, how active they are or, simply, if they need a break.
This is something Melissa Paige, co-CEO of Healthcare Advocate Summit, realized. When she brought her annual event to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, she decided to take action. Paige was three months away from her event when she decided to add selections from Caesars Entertainment’s Wellness Menu to her event. She almost wouldn’t have made the addition, had she not gone to Caesars’ Wellness Forum (previously Wellness Summit).
“We had to pause and think if we were going to go to the Wellness [Forum], if we had time for it. At the end of the day, we needed to make time for it,” Paige says. “We knew nothing about this type of wellness that was listed on the agenda. We didn’t incorporate the wellness activities on our own, outside of exercising and getting those endorphins running.”
An Intro to Wellness
Caesars’ inaugural Wellness Forum took place in June, where the company showcased its wellness sessions and health-focused F&B to 100 meeting professionals and media. This is where Paige discovered that she needed this at her Healthcare Advocate Summit.
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“Going through each of these types of classes—of meditation, of sound bathing, and a forest bath— I had no clue what I was even walking into,” Paige says. “But with each of the wellness activities, we felt a little bit better at the end. I have never been to an event where [all the food] was healthy, like 1,000%—and the opportunity to become full from the healthy meals that were provided, and I didn’t feel sluggish like I normally do after a full conference buffet.”
After the Wellness Forum, Paige says she and Elizabeth Johnson, co-CEOs of Healthcare Advocate Summit, realized they needed to figure out how to incorporate wellness into their next event. What they started with this year was three wellness sessions and a roundtable across three days—attendees had the chance to experience calm in a meditation room, a breathwork and sound bath session and morning yoga.
In incorporating these wellness sessions into her event, Paige says she was okay starting small, because she didn’t know what she and her team could do or who they could grab this late in the game to help support their wellness sessions.
Exceeding Expectations
After connecting with Reina Herschdorfer, director of marketing for national meetings and events at Caesars, Paige decided she wanted to involve a meditation room for 20-30 attendees for three wellness sessions. They were able to partner with Tiffany Zwinge Barger, president of Zwinge Wellness, who isn’t only involved in wellness but also has a background in healthcare and patient care. After incorporating these wellness sessions, Paige quickly ran into a problem she didn’t expect: There were not enough seats to accommodate the influx of attendees who wanted to participate.
“My first thought was, ‘This is profound.’ We ended up utilizing a much larger space behind one of our stages so we could increase space for up to 90 attendees in there,” according to Paige. “Once we noticed how much interest there was with attending these mindfulness-based sessions, we decided to Instacart yoga mats along with additional wellness items to enhance the overall wellness sessions at the last second.”
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Paige says it went so well that they had a handful of guests, who were patients and family members of some of the keynote speakers, that wanted to join in on the wellness sessions as well. “We had guest attendees come up to us and say, ‘Can I sneak in the meditation or the sound bath?’ We let them know they didn’t have to sneak in, they could just walk in.” She says they enjoyed seeing that surge of people wanting to do this.
What the summit has learned and accomplished from this year is that they needed to include more opportunities to enhance the wellness sessions since it became such a huge opportunity for the attendees. “We were hosting the majority of the sessions in the mornings. Some of the attendees could not attend the morning sessions.”
Next year, Paige intends to find other creative ways such as letting attendees pick up yoga mats at the front desk and also host wellness sessions virtually. “Tiffany can be down in the room for those who want to attend live, but why can’t they also be involved and practice in their own room, where you’re comfortable? You can have your makeup off and everything.”
Barger says one question posed to her during the roundtable on the last day was how attendees can incorporate what they learned in their everyday life while working at their respective hospitals.
“Those involved in the sessions were able to reflect on what they learned, so they can incorporate the techniques into their every day routine. We did not involve any inversions such as headstands, we introduced movements that the attendees can do at their desk and/or with their patients along with their standard of care,” Barger stated.
Looking at Next Year
Given that Paige and her team only had three months when they decided to incorporate wellness, since more organic options were not implemented on a more alternative, holistic front, that our team plans to introduce and incorporate going forward for Healthcare Advocate Summit. Next time, she says they will get a pulse on what attendees want beforehand. “We need to promote this like any other agenda or session item,” Paige emphasizes. “We added the wellness sessions on the schedule pretty late. People had already set-up their agenda and sessions.” Next year, they will start up front saying that wellness is just as important as the other key things on the agenda.
“I hope that introducing wellness opportunities to the conference community becomes inspirational and we hope that leadership encourages budgets and funding toward the wellness events,” Paige says. “You don’t have to go crazy with it. There are things that you can do and low-cost to start with. There should be no excuse as to why you can’t do wellness, even if that’s teaching people how to stretch in a chair.”
