| Theme 1: Definition of Wellness and its Relevance |
When asked to define wellness, residents responded:
“Physical and emotional well-being” (resident 1) “Maintain[ing] personal health while attending to work responsibilities” (resident 2) “That ability, I guess, to have balance or to be able to find balance in your life that makes you happy and continue to enjoy what you’re doing” (resident 3) When describing the relevance of wellness in their future practice:
“I mean, if you’ve achieved a level of wellness you’re able to be, like, present with your patients” (resident 1) “I think one of the most important points in my residency training when I really started to emphasize on personal wellness was when [faculty member] taught us about how the care of patients is better when the physicians aren’t burnt out. I think she actually showed it to us in the opposite where care is worse. Outcomes are worse when patients are cared for by
|
| 2. Didactics–Integrate Wellness into Core Curriculum |
“Well, I think one big positive step that this program has already achieved is that the program thinks about it. There’s like a chief’s meeting in the spring when we get new chiefs and you meet the chiefs from other programs. There are a lot of other programs where wellness is just not even in their vocabulary. I think programs need to have that on their radar as a priority, which I think that this program does better than others” (resident 1) “I think we also do a good job of teaching wellness or discussing it early. That’s one of the first things about which we probably talk because it’s kind of needed from the start. They're skills that you'll be using throughout. It's not something that would be very effective if they just waited until third year or something” (resident 3) “A couple of other things with which the program did a good job is the [Residency “Resiliency and Recovery” Group] group meetings that we have . . . . I think that's important because it's regular, it's structured, and it's been nice” (resident 5) “I think that it's also important to note that it's [Residency “Resiliency and Recovery” Group and Intern Support Group] not done outside of our duty hours. It's protected time, meaning that it happens sometimes between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. That's helpful. … it's something that's built into the schedule” (resident 4)
|
| Theme 3: Wellness Skills and Intrapersonal Awareness |
“Self awareness. You have to recognize cues of, I guess, stressors and things that may begin to impact your health and you have to be aware of those things to recognize when to step back and figure out okay, what changes do I need to make to be more effective, to have that, I guess kind of like you said, the balance, … having that balance in your work life and other aspects of life” (resident 4) “There are times where you probably could spend like four hours doing a discharge summary and it would be like the best discharge summary anyone's ever read. That versus doing a discharge summary in 20 minutes that might be adequate and sufficient, but it's more of a bronze standard than the gold standard” (resident 6) “I think prioritizing is a big part of it [wellness] because some nights you probably have assignments you have to get done, you have notes you have to finish. But some nights it’s okay to not do work or skip an hour sleep to go do something fun to recharge” (resident 5) “I think learning how to prioritize, learning how to budget time for certain tasks, so that the time that you had set aside for pursuing your wellness goals actually gets used for that purpose” (resident 6) “I think also recognizing that there is no perfection. I think a lot of times we get so focused on wanting to do things perfectly and right, instead of thinking well, there are multiple ways to do this. It's a learning process throughout our career, not just as residents, not just…it's always going to be that way. You're kind of cutting yourself some slack instead of being so hard when you come to things. You know you are doing well, but recognizing that it's okay to not be perfect because nobody is” (resident 4)
|
