Even as the COVID pandemic dwindles, and life returns to semi-normalcy, healthcare and safety remain on the forefront of everyone’s minds. With her decades of healthcare experience and a superb team of healthcare experts and practitioners, Roslyn Stone and her company Zero Hour Health provide much-needed medical support to a wide range of restaurant clientele.
Total Food Service spoke with Stone to discover how Zero Hour Health can fit into the daily operations of a restaurant, and how its services provide support amidst a health crisis.
As CEO of Zero Hour Health, Roslyn Stone built the company on the back of a long career working in healthcare administration. She watched a former employer whose primary business model is to support major corporations, turn away smaller companies with similar medical needs as larger ones. Seeing demand for supporting smaller and mid-sized organizationss, she began Zero Hour Health. From its humble origins providing resources such as flu shots to chains like Outback Steakhouse has ballooned into a sizable portfolio of restaurants with a diverse range of medical needs.
Now Zero Hour divides its resources between preventing medical crises and responding to the ongoing medical emergencies of its clients. The company assists corporations – particularly growing chains that are outlining their first large-scale operations requirements – in drafting thorough crisis plans that aim to prevent, for example, the outbreak of highly contagious diseases such as norovirus or the flu. However, as Stone quipped, “medical emergencies are inevitable.” Therefore, Zero Hour also assists their clients in the management of ongoing crises by providing support like vaccinations, on-site nurses, disinfection kits, and symptom surveys that minimize infection spread. After all, Stone forewarns, “you’re only as good as your last health inspection!”
Zero Hour’s business model and support system was well-equipped to provide much-needed guidance to its clients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. For Stone and her team, COVID became a concern in January 2020 as she prepared to send a response team of nurses to the Super Bowl. Years of developing illness response tactics meant that the company was carefully observing the burgeoning health crisis in China and its spread abroad; as a result of their foresight, the team added temperature screening to their already thorough Super Bowl food service worker health checks. Just a few weeks later, Stone lamented, “our offices closed; they’re only just reopening two years later.”
For Stone and her company, adjustment to this so-called ‘new normal’ has been difficult yet rewarding. Their diverse client portfolio meant that Zero Hour needed to cooperate with thousands of health departments, each of which drafted their own COVID standards: “we started taking on sixteen-hour workdays, seven days a week,” she says of the toll of increased demand for medical support. On the other hand, the pandemic helped Stone to expand her business, and reaffirmed the importance of cleanliness and health to her clients’ employees. The biggest problem facing her clients nowadays? Mental health.
“90% of Americans believe we’re in a mental health crisis,” a fact that has only worsened as a result of the pandemic and the lockdown, Stone states. She finds that providing resources to support the mental health of her clients’ employees is equally as important as maintaining a clean and sanitary workspace: “The newest data suggests that issues related to mental health contribute to almost 90% of turnover – specifically stress, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse – because employees feel disconnected.” While support structures, such as Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) exist to deal with mental health crises, they are severely underutilized.
A significant part of Zero Hour’s mental health initiative is simply connecting employees to these resources: “mental health is such a complex problem, and employers need a toolkit,” explained Stone. For many of her clients, that toolkit contains a newly launched service called Navigate, which takes a subset of pre-existing clinical teams and trains them as mental health navigators. “We’re giving employees simple tools to get through today,” Stone proudly details. By asking employers to invest in the mental health of their employees, Zero Hour helps maintain a safe and welcoming workspace.
Partnering with Zero Hour and implementing their programs into daily operations is a simple and effective process. Because the company supports such a diverse portfolio of restaurants and, after all, “no corporation is the same,” Zero Hour interacts with and operates inside of a wide range of departments, including Human Resources, Legal, and Administration. The roll-out process typically begins with a team curating and presenting a pitch to a multidisciplinary group of client higher-ups to sell into the company. On a local level, roll-out typically entails meetings between Zero Hour and location employees to discuss protocol and develop stringent standards, because “excellence of operation is what helps prevent crises in the first place.” For Stone and Zero Hour, it’s the little things that can say a lot about how a restaurant is run: “the cleanliness of a bathroom, for example, says a lot about a location’s priorities,” Stone explains. Her company, as a result, helps corporations – big or small – include these small details into their operations manuals to ensure their success.
For Stone and Zero Hour, maintaining a workspace that is clean and safe is paramount. Even as the pandemic recedes, providing medical support to clientele is important, especially amidst the looming mental health crisis. “The bottom line is that it’s good business,” Stone asserted, “If we don’t take care of our employees, we’ve got no place to go.” The company’s large and diverse portfolio of client restaurants, as well as its decades of experience, attest to Zero Hour’s success. It is clear that going forward, Zero Hour is a partner everyone should have.
For more information regarding Zero Hour Health and its resources, visit their website.
