PM2106: Wellness in Residency: The New Gold Standard

Purpose/Objectives: Suicide, burnout, and depression are prevalent among resident physicians. It is hard to make the time for resident physicians to take care of themselves. Residency programs implement wellness programs to improve overall wellness of their residents, but residents may be unaware of these resources.The purpose of this study was to increase resident awareness of workplace resources regarding wellness, increase importance of wellness within the program, and increase resident communication regarding workplace concerns.

Design/Methods: To enhance the awareness about the importance of resident physician wellness, an intervention was made by piloting a program designed to promote resident wellness. Residents were given Likert surveys at the beginning of implementation of wellness program and six months after implementation. Responses were scored with each discrete response option converted to an integer with strongly agree representing a score of 5 and strongly disagree representing a score of 1. We had two independent nonparametric samples, so the one tailed Mann-Whitney was used to assess for statistical significance.

Results: During the first 6 months of the introduction of a resident wellness curriculum, there was a statistically significant increase in residents overall feeling that wellness was an important part of the pediatric program and awareness of workplace resources. Residents felt more aware of having someone to talk to about workplace concerns, but this did not reach statistical significance

Conclusion/Discussion: During the first 6 months of the introduction of a resident wellness curriculum, there was a statistically significant increase in residents overall feeling that wellness was an important part of the pediatric program and awareness of workplace resources. Residents felt more aware of having someone to talk to about workplace concerns, but this did not reach statistical significance.