Sowing Seeds and Cultivating Connections for Well-being
By Tiffany Leung, MD, MPH, FACP, Honorary ACP Well-being Champion
Well-being initiatives can sprout from unexpected seeds. Although a sudden growth spurt may occur, I've found that careful cross-pollination across disciplines, specialties, and geographic and cultural boundaries offer the most return in joy and success. In our many professional and personal roles, we individually seek meaning in what we do, but we often also seek to foster the same with and for peers, mentees, protégés, and friends. ACP offers avenues for these collaborations, through its breadth and depth of expertise and resources and its openness to change in evolving health care and training environments.
Here are three ways that I've drawn from ACP resources and cultivated valuable partnerships toward meaningful changes in well-being:
- Partner beyond borders, across cultures and disciplines. Our values as internists are identical despite different health care systems and cultures: We seek healthy work–life integration and strive toward achieving our career goals. I am partnering with the European Federation of Internal Medicine's Young Internist and Early Career Group of physicians (YI/ECG) and Brightsity, an external provider of virtual, dyadic compassionate leadership skills training, to create a compassionate leadership course. The course is free to 50 ACP early career physicians, with additional availability pending interest! Fill out this 1-minute survey by March 20, 2020, to express an interest in participating. Remember: You can add this activity to your ACP Well-being Champion Activities Tracker. for CME credit for self-learning activities.
- Team up with other Well-being Champions. Working with like-minded Well-being Champion peers is an easy way to connect from diverse geographies around a common goal. In this case, three fellow Well-being Champions (Tammy L. Lin, MD, MPH, FACP of Southern California Region III; Chwen-Yuen Angie Chen, MD, FACP, FASAM of California Northern; and Sima Pendharkar, MD, MPH, FACP of New York, Brooklyn/Queens/Staten Island Region) and I teamed up to launch Medicine in Motion, an initiative to stimulate cultural shift toward a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community. Belonging and community, as well as active engagement toward cultural change, are vital tenets of this locally launched yet broad-reaching initiative. Connect with us on Twitter @motion_med and Instagram as our initiative expands.
- Collaborate with well-being experts in other specialties. Suicidality affects physicians all over the world. Understanding suicide risk and speaking a common language Library/SGIM/Resource Library/Forum/2019/SGIM-Oct-4.pdf. about suicide can only help our community and our patients. To this end, ACP sponsored National Physician Suicide Awareness Day on September 17, 2019, an initiative begun by two physicians of the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors. Click here to learn more about ACP's promotion of physician suicide awareness and prevention.
Want to be featured in our newsletter? Share your success stories and those of inspirational colleagues (both ACP Champions and partners) by e-mailing acpwellbeing@acponline.org.