Announcements
Opportunities for 1:1 Coaching With Kerri Palamara, MD, FACP
Well-being Champions can now sign up for one-on-one coaching sessions! There will be four slots available every month starting in August! Schedule an appointment today by adding your name to the online sign-up sheet. You will be contacted directly by a staff member to confirm a time.
You can claim CME/MOC for sessions dedicated to learning about coaching and improving your professional performance under the “Self Study—Consultation With an Expert” category in your Activities Tracker. Personal 1:1 coaching sessions are not CME eligible.
Kerri and all of us at the ACP Well-being Program are very excited to make this available to you! For questions regarding the coaching sessions, please contact us at acpwellbeing@acponline.org
Claim CME-/MOC-Eligible Activities Through Our Global Collaboration Tool
As a Well-being Champion, you can claim CME-/MOC-eligible activities through our Champion community's Well-being Champion Activities Tracker.
Enter ALL of your Champion activities so we can gather important and timely information to feed your Champion Activities Global Collaboration Report (target release date—December 2019). Some activities under ACP Virtual Training Webinar and Self-study are CME/MOC eligible (see CME/MOC FAQ) and others are not.
The biannual Champion Activities Global Collaboration Report will provide our Champions with a go-to tool to see who among your colleagues is working on similar projects and where your goals are overlapping. This information will help you leverage opportunities for global collaboration and resource sharing to maximize the individual and collective reach and impact of the efforts of our well-being community.
We look forward to seeing your activities! If you need assistance or have questions, please contact us at acpwellbeing@acponline.org
Addressing the Burnout Epidemic: A Training Program for Health Care Leaders (July 9-12, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN)
Are you a health care leader looking for opportunities to learn about individual and organizational approaches of promoting a culture of wellness? Register for a training program on Addressing the Burnout Epidemic by contacting the Center for Professional Health at Vanderbilt University Medical Center by e-mail here or by phone at 615-936-0678.
This training is for program directors, division chiefs, department chairs, chief medical officers, chief nursing officers, and other leaders from medicine, nursing, and dentistry. The registration fee is $2,500.00 and includes all course materials, an individual wellness report, leadership books, CME credit, parking, meals, and a Tuesday evening reception. A full information flyer is also available here.
Noteworthy Resources
Appreciative Inquiry: Tool to Maintain Healthy and Thriving Teams
The fifth meeting of the National Academy of Medicine's Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience focused on redesigning the clinical learning environment. Timothy P. Brigham, MDiv, PhD, spoke about using appreciative inquiry as a tool to promote and maintain healthy and rich working environments for physicians and their teams.
Appreciative inquiry is a framework created by David Cooperrider that “attempts to use ways of asking questions and envisioning the future in order to foster positive relationships and build on the present potential of a given person, organization or situation” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry). Check out the links below to learn more about this great accompaniment to the positive psychology tools featured in your Champion training.
Use appreciative inquiry today!
- This 10-minute video provides a good overview of the framework and its history.
- This appreciative interviews facilitation tool will get you started in using the framework.
New NAM Perspectives Discussion Paper
Gender-Based Differences in Burnout: Issues Faced by Women Physicians
Excerpt: Women now account for an increasingly large percentage of medical school students and practicing physicians, yet there is still a scarcity of research on how gender-related differences can affect clinician burnout and well-being. Recognizing gender-related differences is critical in designing effective strategies to improve clinician well-being and to identify, treat, and prevent burnout.
This NAM Perspectives Discussion Paper examines how gender-related differences can manifest and some strategies for ensuring well-being for all health professionals.
It's time to take care of those who take care of us. Read more>>
Annals of Internal Medicine The Billion-Dollar Cost of Physician Burnout
Excerpt: Results: On a national scale, the conservative base-case model estimates that approximately $4.6 billion in costs related to physician turnover and reduced clinical hours is attributable to burnout each year in the United States. This estimate ranged from $2.6 billion to $6.3 billion in multivariate probabilistic sensitivity analyses. At an organizational level, the annual economic cost associated with burnout related to turnover and reduced clinical hours is approximately $7600 per employed physician each year.
From the Trenches
Dr. Melba Feliciano, the Well-being Champion from our Puerto Rico Chapter, helped organize a well-being forum for female internists entitled “Food for the Mind and the Soul of Women in Internal Medicine.”
The event took place on Saturday, June 1, 2019, and featured presentations on the importance of exercise, tips for cooking healthy meals, and relaxation activities. Dr. Feliciano is already planning her next event, which will be open to both male and female internists.
If you're interested in planning a similar event and looking for guidance, you can e-mail Dr. Feliciano at m.feliciano66@gmail.com—or start a conversation on your private forum.
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
In the News
The stories below are examples of how physicians are actively making culture changes and combatting moral injury in the systems level.
From Moms to Medical Doctors, Burnout Is Everywhere These Days
By Jenny Rough, The Washington Post
Excerpt: Dr. Steven Manning shared, “I began to think, ‘I'm burned out. How did I get to this point? I don't enjoy coming into work.’” It wasn't too late to make a change. Within a year, Manning started a direct primary care practice, a model where patients pay a membership fee, negating the need for insurance billing. Without mounds of paperwork, he had time to do what he truly wanted: help patients.
The Real Reason Docs Burn Out
By Jeffrey Bendix, Medical Economics
Excerpt: Adam Schwarz, MD, an internist in Hanover, NH, spends a great deal of time talking with unhappy physicians in his role as a “well-being champion,” part of the American College of Physicians' Physician Well-being and Professional Satisfaction initiative designed to combat burnout among ACP members. But the majority of doctors he encounters “identify more with the moral injury mindset than they do burnout,” he says.
The difference, he says, is that burnout implies feelings of being overwhelmed by the demands of being a physician, whereas “moral injury speaks to the sense that they have fallen below what they think standards should be or they're cutting corners due to productivity requirements in ways that make them feel uncomfortable.”
Patients Before Paperwork
ACP Patients Before Paperwork Initiative
Patients Before Paperwork is an ACP initiative designed to reinvigorate the patient–physician relationship by challenging unnecessary practice burdens.
Download the Patients Before Paperwork Infographic
What ACP Is Doing
Since the launch of ACP's Patients Before Paperwork initiative in 2015, the College has worked to identify and prioritize the most burdensome administrative tasks faced by ACP members and their patients; develop significant policy recommendations for how to address these administrative tasks; and engage in ongoing outreach and stakeholder engagement efforts with external sources of administrative and regulatory burden.
What You Can Do to Help
To help the Patients Before Paperwork initiative, you can provide your feedback with our new online data collection tool. This tool is a means for physicians to communicate administrative pain points with ACP staff, share best practices and innovative ideas with each other, and help inform the creation of additional tools and services. Entries will be added to the Administrative Tasks and Best Practices Library.
- Tell us about your ideas to address administrative tasks.
- Send in specific examples or vignettes explaining how these tasks have had an impact on your ability to care for a patient.
- Let us know how can ACP best serve you to address these issues
Share Your Experiences and Tips Today!
You may also contact the Patients Before Paperwork team directly at policy-regs@acponline.org or discuss these issues in the Member Forum on Promoting Physician Well-being and Professional Satisfaction.
Forum
Discuss the news topic above and share advice and ideas with other Well-being Champions in your private forum.
IM Thriving is copyrighted ©2019 by the American College of Physicians.