Shifting Focus from Burnout and Wellness toward Individual and Organizational Resilience

Burnout is reported to be epidemic among physicians and medical trainees, and wellness has been the predominant target for intervention in academic medicine over the past several years. However, both burnout and wellness suffer from a lack of standardized definition, often making interventions difficult to generalize and extrapolate to different sites. Although well-meaning, current frameworks surrounding wellness and burnout have limitations in fully addressing the challenges of improving physician mental health. Wellness as a framework does not inherently acknowledge the adversity inevitably experienced in the practice of medicine and in the lives of medical trainees. During a crisis such as the current pandemic, wellness curricula often do not offer adequate frameworks to address the personal, organizational, or societal crises that may ensue. This leaves academic institutions and their leadership ill-equipped to appropriately address the factors that contribute to burnout. More recently, resilience has been explored as another framework to positively influence physician wellness and burnout. Resilience acknowledges the inevitable adversity individuals encounter in their life and work, allowing for a more open discussion on the tensions and flexibility between facets of life. However, emphasizing personal resiliency without addressing organizational resiliency may leave physicians feeling alienated or marginalized from critical support and resources that organizations can and should provide.

Despite intense focus on wellness and burnout, there have not been significant positive changes in physicians' mental health. Many interventions have aimed at the individual level with mindfulness or other reflective exercises; unfortunately these have demonstrated only marginal benefit. Systems level approaches have demonstrated more benefit but the ability of organizations to carry out any specific intervention is likely to be limited by their own unique constraints and may limit the spread of innovation. We believe the current use of these conceptual lenses (wellness and burnout) has been clouded by lack of uniformity of definitions, an array of measurement tools with no agreed-upon standard, a lack of understanding of the complex interaction between the constructs involved, and an over-emphasis on personal rather than organizational interventions and solutions.

If the frameworks of burnout and wellness are limited, and personal resilience by itself is inadequate, what framework would be helpful? We believe that focusing on organizational resilience and the connecting dimensions between organizations and their physicians could be an additional framework helpful in addressing physician mental health. An organization connects with its members along multiple dimensions, including communication, recognition of gifts, shared vision, and sense of belonging. By finding ways to positively affect these dimensions, organizations can create change in the culture and mental health of physicians and trainees. Educational institutions specifically would be well-served to consider organizational resilience and its relationship to individuals.