Physician, resident and medical student well-being is getting more attention and programming, particularly as alarming burnout trends were exacerbated as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on. Yet the well-being of, and the unique stressors faced by, physician educators and other medical educators has been largely overlooked.
A first-of-its-kind book, Educator Well-Being in Academic Medicine, published by the AMA last year, features insights and guidance for administrators and other leaders in academic medicine looking to enrich educator well-being and heal U.S. medical education. It is the product of years of work by the AMA ChangeMedEd Initiative—formerly known as the Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium—to better understand well-being in the medical education setting.
The editors of that text recently presented on the importance of the topic and potential solutions. They said the publication is a valuable resource to help change the tide and offers solutions for the considerable stressors medical educators encounter.
“Part of the reason we created this volume is so that you can take it back to your institutions and say: ‘The AMA has identified this as a problem,’” said Allison Knight, PhD, one of the book’s co-editors, during a session at the 2023 AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago last month.
“It’s a problem across institutions and organizations. No one can do all of these things, but institutions do need to focus in on how they can start to bring this concept to light. This is a need, and it is going to affect the work force if unaddressed,” said Knight, the assistant vice dean for student affairs and director of student wellness at Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Four areas for improvement
In offering a framework for necessary changes in educator well-being, presenters drew on what they called the four frames of organizational excellence. Each arena has a unique role in improving educator well-being.
Structural improvements. These could include sufficient funding for the educational mission, changes to promotion processes, protected time for and streamlining clinical workflows to facilitate educational activities, or a system of Education Value Units to measure educators’ contributions.
Presenters highlighted other areas for instituting equity-based supports, such as assessing and addressing the structural factors that disproportionally impact the well-being of historically excluded and marginalized educators.
Human resource-driven improvements. This category includes increased professional development, peer coaching and well-being/mental health programming and support.
“When I look at some of the things we list as solutions in our human resources category, there are a lot of the things that we have been doing for our clinical faculty,” said Margaret Rea, PhD, another co-editor, during the session, hosted by the ChangeMedEd Initiative.
“Look at the many peer support programs for clinicians that got such traction during the pandemic, but where are those programs for our educators?” said Rea, who directs student and resident wellness and is a clinical professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine.
Politically driven improvements. Both inside an institution and on a larger scale—through organizations such as the AMA—change can be made via advocacy, representation and value-added opportunities including promoting representation of historically-excluded educators in senior leadership and system-level committees.
“Within the structure of an institution, we have to consider if educators are represented,” Rea said. “Are they at the table in terms of decisions about what is going on within a school or a hospital?
Symbolic improvements. Morale is key for sustaining a positive workplace culture. To build and grow, educators need recognition, reward and a sense of community and belonging.
“How do we raise up education?” Rea said. “We are building our physicians and the health sciences, but sometimes the role of education doesn’t get the energy. We have to ask: how can we raise that up and build a community?”
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