I’d like to welcome Rachel Seaman, MD, who will take over the role as physician lead for UHA provider wellness. Dr. Seaman is a huge proponent of encouraging patients and colleagues to live a life of wellness and balance through

seven daily practices, which she refers to as The Seaman Seven.

Many thanks to Maia Hightower, our former Associate Medical Officer and Chair of the Provider Wellness Committee, who recently left UHA to pursue a professional opportunity in the Midwest.

Provider wellness and professional fulfillment are high priorities for Stanford Medicine* and UHA. The UHA Provider Wellness Committee was founded on the following principles:

• Our organization can only be as strong and healthy as the providers who lead it.
• The wellness of our providers is strongly linked to our ability to provide the best care for our patients.
• It is the organization’s responsibility to help create a practice environment that enables the delivery of the highest quality of care (without relying on superhuman efforts by our providers and staff).
• It is our responsibility as physicians to care for ourselves and for each other, so that we reinforce the resilience needed to deal with the inevitable stresses of even a very well run medical practice.
• We will also work to improve the wellness and professional satisfaction of our staff.

Our recent Provider Survey results (full report here) indicated that almost a third of our UHA providers are experiencing burnout. This may be slightly lower than in comparable medical groups, but is nevertheless unacceptable! What’s more, only 20 percent of our providers feel a high level of professional fulfillment. We don’t have benchmarks for that metric, but we do know that we want to do much better! With each medical group, we are developing A3’s to address these issues.  You’ll be hearing more in the future regarding next steps.

*Click below for recent news coverage of some Stanford Medicine wellness initiatives:

Washington Post: The innovative Stanford program that’s saving emergency room doctors from burnout

Chicago Tribune: Physician burnout is on the rise

Please leave your thoughts and suggestions about provider wellness on this blog.