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The mission is to help organizations create a culture of trust & wellbeing in medicine.
Physician wellness is of paramount importance to our patients, to each of us as individuals and to our profession.
It’s no secret that the practice of medicine is both incredibly gratifying and highly challenging. The culture of medicine is both beautiful and flawed. The most beautiful aspect is that we are healers, and no one will take that away from us. Ever. A flawed part of the culture is that, as physicians and other healthcare providers, our own humanity has been devalued. Our culture and systems have both implicitly and explicitly reinforced the concept that our own needs – physical, mental and emotional – are unimportant. Vulnerability is weakness. Any efforts to acknowledge our needs and to get support in dealing with them is anathema. And yet we know from multiple studies that this is unsustainable. We also know from our own and our colleagues’ experiences that this is just wrong.
There is a convincing body of literature indicating that physician wellness is not close to the level it should be. Concerningly, we are seeing a high prevalence of physician burnout, depression, and suicide. *
"My deepest hope is that we can give the same compassionate care to ourselves and each other as we do to our patients and their families."
- Dr. Jo Shapiro
Attention to physician wellness may lead to important benefits such as greater patient satisfaction, long term physician satisfaction, and increased physician productivity.
There are 2 basic reasons for providing the resources to improve wellness. First, it is the morally right thing to do. Physicians—our colleagues—are suffering. Second, it supports the outcomes we care about. It is difficult to provide high-quality compassionate patient care when we ourselves are emotionally, physically, or cognitively challenged.
Offering and accepting support depends on creating a culture of trust in medicine. We all have a responsibility to support such a culture. A culture that values our humanity and our wellbeing. A culture that keeps us connected as a community. This responsibility extends from the leadership of our organizations, to our teams, to our learners, to each other, and to ourselves.
The Programs
There are multiple programs to help create a culture of trust in the organization, in service of improving clinician wellness and patient quality. The following are some of these key programs:
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