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
Social media is an emerging and underutilized tool in graduate medical education. Current generations of physicians increasingly rely on social media for information and connectedness. The use of social media in medical education provides a low-resource/high-impact strategy to improve physician wellness, reduce burnout, enhance medical knowledge, and supplement residency programs' recruiting efforts. Creating and maintaining an effective social media presence necessitates the use of a well-rounded team of residents at varying levels of training to ensure diverse posting perspectives. Account managers should establish goals and policies to ensure continuity and cohesiveness in their posting. Social media teams should work to increase the account's reach and interaction through engaging images, topical hashtags, location geo-tags, and tagging other accounts and follow their own progress through analytics. Using these twelve tips will help your program create a robust, impactful social media presence.
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