Healthcare workers in the U.S. and Europe are struggling to sustain their ability to patient care in the face of acute and chronic systemic stressors. Sources of stress include short staffing, service models that compromise physicians’ ability to address patient concerns, excessive administrative burdens, inadequate physical infrastructure to support care, and inadequate resources for addressing the emotional and mental health needs of individual physicians. Stressors arise from systemic financial constraints that impose excessive service demands on physicians and their healthcare teams. Fiscal restraints reducing support for patient care may be compounded by ineffective fiscal management and inadequate resources from governmental and private insurance payors. Caught in this maelstrom, physicians complain that their autonomy is severely limited, their voices ignored and their value unrecognized. When stressors impose demands on work that exceed resources to perform them, the physician manifests symptoms of burnout. Beyond burnout, physicians confront the existential threat of failing to sustain their commitment to the “covenant of care”. When physicians perceive that they are failing to sustain closely held ethical and moral values, they experience moral distress and injury.

Plans for a Taskforce to address physician wellness at the level of the UCSD Health System will be convened by the UCSD Wellness Oversight Committee and charged to define an optimal environment to support physician wellbeing, critically define gaps between the optimal state, and make specific recommendations for actions, including promoting interventions to measurably enhance wellbeing. The Taskforce will include leading national experts and key UCSD Health System leaders. The Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion will support and play a leadership role in the operations of the Taskforce. In this session, attendees will:

• Define the stressors that challenge the wellbeing of physicians.
• Enumerate the various sources of stressors.
• Consider actions and interventions that could be initiated at their institutions to address physician burnout and moral injury.

This panel session features four physicians who will describe their “lived experiences” coping with physical, emotional and mental challenges impacting their personal and professional lives. As more physicians come forward to talk about their own struggles, the rest of us feel more connected, less alone. There is no better way to reduce stigma. By telling their unique, personal stories, they will describe the importance of facing and accepting their challenges, finding ways of overcoming or adopting to them, and maintaining hope and personal growth. These stories will provide a hopeful arc to mental health experiences, shattering stigma, modeling help seeking, and contributing to a new culture where mental health can be viewed and addressed openly and without shame.

• Foster connection, acceptance and resilience by sharing human stories.
• Encourage healthcare professionals battling demoralization, burnout, depression, substance use, bereavement, shame, and humiliation to realize that relief and success are possible.
• Model mental health self-care by disclosing personal struggles when appropriate and highlighting that everyone needs to lean on others for support or treatment.

This session will discuss the similarities, differences, and interplay between stress, burnout, and trauma, with an objective to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset to grow beyond burnout. Learning objectives include:

• Explain the difference between a Fixed and Growth Mindset.
• Implement a strategy to developing a Growth Mindset.
• Implement strategies towards building a wellness culture at the individual and organizational level.

Despite significant attention and interventions, health care professionals continue to suffer from high rates of burnout and depression. Many of the efforts continue to focus on individual strategies.  In this presentation, Dr. Slavin will describe a model and process to guide multi-faceted environmental approaches to this problem. Learning objectives include:

• Describe eight drivers of burnout.
• Describe an approach to determining strengths and problem areas in the clinical learning environment.
• Describe individual strategies to manage and combat negative emotions, cynicism, and pessimism and thus contribute positively to the culture of the clinical learning environment.

Discover emerging wellness research at UC San Diego and nationwide.

Participants will learn about the origins and purpose of Schwartz Rounds, understand their transformative impact on team dynamics and staff well-being, and explore practical steps for developing a Schwartz Rounds program within their own organizations. By the end of the session, attendees will be equipped with tools and strategies to create a supportive environment that enhances both staff collaboration and patient care outcomes. Learning objectives include:

• Understand and recognize the purpose and history of Schwartz Rounds in Healthcare.
• Learn how to develop your own Schwartz Rounds program.
• Recognize the impact of Schwartz Rounds on healthcare teams.

In the hierarchy of needs, safety is fundamental. But what does it mean for healthcare workers to be and feel safe at work? In this session, participants will get a first look at new data that asks leaders and bedside team members exactly that. We’ll delve into the three pillars of safety: psychological/emotional safety, health justice, and physical safety. We’ll examine the specific practices that healthcare stakeholders value within and across these three pillars – and where there’s agreement and disagreement between leaders and bedside staff, between doctors and nurses, and between minoritized and non-minoritized team members. After this session attendees will be able to:

• Understand the three pillars of safety and why all three are essential.
• Identify areas of alignment and misalignment between key stakeholder groups in healthcare about what’s necessary to be safe at work.
• Chart a path toward a safer healthcare system for all who work there.

Discover emerging wellness research at UC San Diego and nationwide.

“We must shift burnout from a ‘me’ problem to a ‘we’ problem.” – General, U. S. (2022). The US Surgeon General’s framework for workplace mental health & well-being. Washington, DC: US Public Health Service.

Healthcare is a calling, and most of us, much of the time, meet the call with gratitude, pride and even joy. But healthcare also is a uniquely stressful profession with high rates of traumatic stress, burnout, substance use/misuse, unattended depression, and suicide risk. Thus, leading healthcare organizations and institutions recognize a national imperative to shift the culture of healthcare training and practice from “toughing it out,” alone and in silence, to one where healthcare professionals feel cared for themselves, engaged in the work they do, appreciated as critical parts of the healthcare team, and proud of practicing their craft. Only then will caregivers be poised to provide the most compassionate and skilled service to those in their care. This session will describe different models of culture change and care for healthcare providers implemented in four academic health centers.

• Understand key components of four heath provider wellness and mental health programs designed to enhance medical learner and physicians’ resilience, engagement, and well-being and to mitigate burnout and suicide risk.
• Anticipate and overcome obstacles to implementing physician wellness and suicide prevention programs.
• Be better prepared to implement physician learner and/or provider wellness and suicide prevention interventions at participants’ home programs.