Healthy Doctors

What?

“A healthy doctor is a better doctor.”

To be able to work well and professionally fulfilled, also in the long term, it is essential for doctors that they take care of their own health and vitality, in other words, their well-being. Moreover, research shows that vitality benefits the provision of high quality patient care.

The vitality of doctors has become an evident part of the professionalism of medical specialists and residents. In the Netherlands, in postgraduate medical education, explicit attention for doctors’ vitality is demanded in hospital audits. Many hospitals have developed and offer interventions to doctors who want or must work to improve their vitality. It can be helpful to use the WellNext Scan before intervening to better align the needs of doctors and their departments with interventions provided by the hospital.

The WellNext Scan evaluates the vitality of medical specialists and residents within a department. The tool considers the influence of several environmental and individual factors on doctors’ experienced vitality. In other words, it looks at Wellbeing in Context.

The WellNext Scan is inspired by the wellbeing model of the American Stanford University.
The scan maps four domains, looking at vitality and three influencing factors: organizational culture, organization of work and invidiual strengths and resources. For these factors, the WellNext Scan measures how they are perceived and whether these can be discussed.

Why?

The vitality of doctors has become an evident part of the professionalism of medical specialists and residents. In the Netherlands, in postgraduate medical education, explicit attention for doctors’ vitality is demanded in hospital audits. Many hospitals have developed and offer interventions to doctors who want or must work to improve their vitality. It can be helpful to use the WellNext Scan before intervening to better align the needs of doctors and their departments with interventions provided by the hospital.

How?

Evaluation takes place using web-based questionnaires. All doctors (medical specialists and/or residents) of a department fill in a questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of 45 short statements that can be scored on Likert-type scales. The questionnaire only takes a few minutes, and there is ‘free text’ space to clarify the scores. The Perito Professional Performance platform entirely automates conducting the questionnaires and generates one WellNext report per department. If both medical specialists and residents have completed a questionnaire, the results of both groups will be fed back separately in the report.

By whom?

The WellNext Scan has been developed for doctors: medical specialists and residents can use it. Each doctor completes a questionnaire.

Anonymity

Participation in the WellNext Scan is anonymous for all participants. In the WellNext Report, results are reported separately for medical specialists and residents, provided enough respondents participated for each group. Only the number of doctors that completed the questionnaire is reported. Other data such as gender or residency year are not reported: these data may be used for scientific research in an anonymized dataset.

Report

After the pre-agreed measurement period, the WellNext report is generated automatically. The report can be downloaded by the ‘administrator’ of the measurement, usually – depending on the organization – the team leader or department chair.

Well, Next?

Insight into perceived vitality in your department can be the start of reflection, meaningful conversation and possible change.

Research

The WellNext Scan was inspired by the Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment (Stanford University, CA, USA). For the operationalization of the influencing factors, scientifically validated constructs have been used where possible. The Professional Performance & Compassionate Care research groups (Amsterdam UMC) developed the WellNext Scan in collaboration with doctors.

Further information can be found here (in Dutch): WellNext Scan – Informatie over de Vitaliteitsmeting