Perceived wellness among pharmacy residents during COVID-19

Well-being, burnout, and resiliency have been topics of discussion among health care providers over the last few years. Wellness can relate to many areas or domains in our lives such as financial, social, spiritual, physical, and occupational, whereas well-being is career focused. Wellness is multidimensional and encompasses different domains, and well-being usually focuses on a singular domain. Literature supports the study of well-being in health care workers; however, research is limited for assessing wellness in different domains of health care workers.

This study sought to describe perceived pharmacy resident wellness during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

A 67-item survey was sent by e-mail to eligible study participants, including any postgraduate year (PGY) 1, 2, or 24-month pharmacy resident completing/completed their training in June 2019-July 2020. The primary outcome was perceived resident wellness based on the 7 domains from Princeton UMatter Wellness Self-Assessment, developed to measure self-perceptions of wellness across dimensions. Descriptive statistics and participant scores were aggregated and presented as a total domain score. Statistics and scores were determined from completed surveys.

A total of 418 participants accessed the survey, 384 met inclusion criteria, and 326 completed the survey. Of the participants, 77% were female with 85% completing a traditional PGY-1 residency program. The wellness domain with the lowest total was physical wellness, with a domain median of 23 of 28. The highest-scoring domain was social wellness, with a median of 27.

Perceived resident wellness during COVID-19 was highest in the social domain and lowest in the physical wellness domain. Residency programming administrators could use this information to make improvements to orientation practices and wellness domain programming throughout the duration of residency training during a pandemic.