Improving Overall Resident and Faculty Wellbeing Through Program-Sponsored Innovations

Abstract

Problem Studies suggest that burnout and wellbeing are inversely associated, thus early identification of risk factors for burnout and targeted interventions to improve resident wellbeing could help mitigate these outcomes. However, little is known about the impact of department-sponsored wellbeing programs on improving personal physician wellbeing. Approach Our innovation attempted to create a culture of physician wellbeing within one year (October 2016-October 2017) after discovering high levels of burnout among our Internal Medicine residents and faculty. All residents and faculty were invited to participate in programming and an internally-developed "Wellness Needs Assessment" tracked the effectiveness of our efforts. Wellness endeavors were generally low-resource/high-yield interventions and included establishing a Physician Wellbeing Committee and budget, creating a robust social media presence, and providing over thirty event-based and continuous wellness interventions throughout the year. Outcomes Over one year, our wellbeing program demonstrated improvements across all ten sub-domains of wellness, although the distribution of responses when comparing their current overall level of wellness did not reach statistical significance. A large decrease in the rate of self-reported "thoughts of self-harm" was noted. Over 90% of participating physicians felt that the "culture of wellness" in the workplace had influenced their personal wellness. Next Steps Next steps include determining which wellbeing interventions are the most effective in promoting a culture of wellness and improving personal wellbeing. We plan to determine sustainability of the program over time, growing our arsenal of effective strategies to improve culture, and determine the effectiveness of this strategy across other specialties and locations.

Keywords

• Resident well-being
• self-harm
• suicide
• wellness
• wellbeing
• physician wellbeing