Accelerate Your Well-Being Work with Courses and Conferences

To be effective, a strategy to promote well-being must be tailored to meet the unique challenges, opportunities, and goals of each organization. While customization is necessary, we believe several fundamental components can provide a blueprint to guide strategy for most organizations: foundational programs, culture transformation, rapid iterative experimentation, and sustainability. 

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Organizational efforts to address clinician burnout must include a wide array of potential drivers and regular measurement of dimensions of clinician well-being, such as satisfaction, professional fulfillment, burnout, and other measures of distress. Organizations must also track operational metrics related to well-being, such as time spent on documentation outside of clinical hours. It is not possible to accomplish these goals through wellness committees, which, alone, are unable to affect large scale improvement. Developing and overseeing the execution of a strategy to address these challenges and working with other operational leaders to drive organizational change require a correctly placed senior leader with appropriate authority and resources.

The health care CWO position was created for this purpose. This leader oversees these large institutional commitments and is empowered to implement changes that are designed to drive system-level progress.

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Healthcare organizations are typically guided by a board of directors responsible to help insure the organization to achieves its mission. Board members are typically senior executives with sophisticated understanding of organizations, experience leading people and knowledge how to mitigate risks to the organization. While most board members develop an understanding of healthcare quality and economics, fewer appreciate the unique human resources challenges specific to healthcare professionals.

A recent publication led by Stanford experts suggested that there are seven principles to communicate to hospital boards regarding physician well-being:

1. Burnout is prevalent in healthcare professionals.
2. The well-being of healthcare professionals impacts quality of care.
3. Healthcare professionals' distress costs organizations a lot of money.
4. Greater personal resilience is not the solution. 
5. Different occupations and disciplines have unique needs.
6. Evidence and tactics are available to address the problem.
7. Interventions work.

Fundamentally, it is important for hospital board members to recognize the epidemic of burnout among healthcare professionals as well as its implications for the health of the organization. Board members should ask organizational officers for regular updates on objective measures of burnout and professional fulfillment within the organization as well as an overview of the plan and for improvement and the metrics by which progress will be measured.

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