By SHANNON O. WELLS
In 2018, Joe Losee and Jennifer Berliner unveiled Physician THRIVE with the mission of enhancing access to well-being programs and resources for UPMC doctors through innovations that promote well-being and professional fulfillment.
“It’s still ongoing and has many different aspects to it,” said Losee, associate dean of faculty in the School of Medicine. “I addressed it from the School of Medicine side for our faculty, and (Berliner) addressed it from the health system side.”
Recognizing, however, that Physician THRIVE did not encompass the full range of the school’s faculty, Losee and his colleagues in the School of Medicine’s Office of Faculty Affairs sought to create a more inclusive program based on the Physician THRIVE model.
Well-being initiatives in academic medical centers, he noted, are typically based on physician well-being and physician burnout, and don’t necessarily consider scientists’ experiences.
“Because we have about 1,050 non-clinical faculty who are non-clinical MDs, or mostly PhDs, who are faculty in our school, who were not being addressed,” Losee said.
Based on a survey through the Professional Academic Well-being Consortium focused on professional fulfillment and burnout, the School of Medicine’s Pitt Scientist Well-being Initiative was born.
“We really mirrored the physician well-being program and created much of the same programming in the School of Medicine and focused on our non-clinical faculty,” Losee explained.
Adam Straub, assistant dean in the Office of Faculty Affairs, said the survey, which included open questions about “positive drivers of well-being” along with standardized questions, led to initiatives to address challenges faculty members commonly face related to fulfillment and burnout.
Feedback from Pitt scientists formed the basis for five professional well-being-based pillars, including pay equity, academic research and recognition, career development, workplace culture and environment, and administrative efficiency.
“We’ve been working on these five pillars over the past year and a half, once we got the survey results,” Straub said. “We broke it up into groups, and they’ve been working towards trying to figure out ways that we can (increase) these opportunities for scientists to limit the amount of burnout and increase our fulfillment in the School of Medicine.”
Programming that resulted from the survey includes:
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Wellness symposiums
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Awards for faculty who demonstrate significant contributions to well-being initiatives
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Monthly departmental meetings led by identified departmental “champions”
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Five committees that focus on different areas of well-being
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Peer coaching training and service programs
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Orientation and onboarding events
“We have subgroups that work together to address the five different areas,” Straub explained. “They help with the symposium, help communicate with their department and work with their department chair on well-being initiatives.”
Drawing from the survey results, the team identified five pillars of “strengths” that drive positive well-being in scientists. They include:
1. Research excellence
2. A collaborative environment, or high regard for the collaborative and intellectual atmosphere facilitating meaningful academic and research activities
3. Growth opportunities that provide “fulfilling and motivating” professional and personal development
4. Academic freedom and inclusion
5. Quality of colleagues.
“Those five areas are what drive positive well-being among our scientists,” he said. “That’s something I think we’re really proud of here at Pitt. The survey really emphasizes what we need to be working toward in the School of Medicine.”
A School of Medicine Well-Being symposium from 1 to 4 p.m. June 6 at the University Club will include a review of “all of the things that we’ve accomplished over the past year-and-a-half related to these five pillars,” Straub said.
Speakers at the event include Losee, Anantha Shekhar, School of Medicine dean and senior vice chancellor for the Health Sciences, and Jennifer Askey, an academic wellness coach. Her keynote will address “What Does it Mean to be Well at Work?” Click here for registration information.
Because of the survey’s timing, any stress and well-being challenges related to executive orders affecting federal research funding this year aren’t reflected in the current data.
“We have not really begun to address the current challenges, because a lot of the current initiatives are based on what we found in our survey in 2023,” Straub explained. “But we have a new survey that’s coming up at the end of this year, which will most likely address the current climate and the challenges that our faculty are facing.”
Losee used medical terminology to illustrate the approach.
“There’s a lot of work that we have done. We took the vital signs with the survey. We made the diagnosis and then we had a multi-pronged treatment plan,” he said. “And we’re going back to the doctor this fall for another temperature check.”
By comparing the two surveys, Straub’s team can gauge factors of fulfillment and burnout that have changed, “not only across the School of Medicine, but also at the departmental level.”
“We also have the open-text comments, and we’ll probably gear those questions toward the current climate to address the challenges our scientists are now facing so that we can have a number of initiatives to work on in the next two years,” he said. “In the meantime, we just try to fill in and see how we can improve the fulfillment of our scientists.”
With many schools participating in the Professional Academic Well-being Consortium-based survey, results from Pitt’s School of Medicine are “comparable to other institutions related to the burnout and fulfillment.”
“So we do have some type of comparison to other schools,” Straub said. “We do not have internal comparison yet. That’s what we’ll get into later this year.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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