The Scholars of Wellness program developed by a psychiatrist at Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine decreased physician burnout among the majority of participants and led to increased comfort in communicating with leadership to drive change.
The American Medical Association spotlighted the program and the creator, Gaurava Agarwal, MD, associate professor of psychiatry, and behavioral sciences and medical education at Northwestern, in a March 23 blog post.
The year-long scholars program is in its third cohort, providing resources and training to drive change and address the sources of burnout across physician departments. In its first run, which included 10 physicians from different specialties, 60 percent of scholars said their burnout had decreased, 70 percent said they felt confident recommending Northwestern Medicine as a workplace and all participants said they were more comfortable collaborating with leadership to promote change.
Three notes on what makes the the program effective:
1. Prioritize leadership building. "There's this idea of coaching in the healthcare ecosystem and what we've really done here is we've selected leaders and front-line physicians who we are effectively coaching," Dr. Agarwal told the AMA. Physician scholars in the program are each assigned two coaches. "We're coaching them on how they should think about wellness, change management and process improvement, but also how they can coach others in creating a well-being environment."
2. Start small before implementing the initiative on a wider scale. Evaluating the success of pilot programs at the local level was important before rolling it out on a wider scale and helped establish peer-support, Dr. Agarwal said.
3. Collaboration builds trust. A focus area of the scholars program was to encourage physicians to collaborate with leadership and administrative business partners to drive change. "When we are working together on a project, people really started investing," Dr. Agarwal said, adding that "when we start to understand each other, we build trust."