A Review of Well-being Assessment Instruments in Hospital Medicine

Although many well-being measurement instruments are used by hospitalist groups, the benefit of one instrument over others has not been established. We performed a review of well-being measurement instruments used by hospital medicine groups and developed a framework for hospitalists to choose an instrument to best evaluate their group's well-being. The review was performed using the following databases: PubMed, Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane, CINAHL, Psych INFO, Web of Science, and Scopus. After deleting repeat citations, a total of 330 citations were identified. Two authors read the titles, abstracts, and papers as necessary to identify papers that measured hospitalist well-being. The search identified 35 papers that used well-being instruments to identify 11 specific instruments used. Once instruments were identified, the author group reviewed the papers to determine which instrument features were important for inclusion in a summary table. The authors used the drivers of burnout as identified by Shanafelt et al. to evaluate the benefit of the instruments. Of the 11 most relevant well-being measurement instruments identified, the majority assess three or fewer categories of drivers of burnout as identified by Shanafelt et al. with only three instruments measuring five or more drivers. The review provides a practical guide for hospital medicine groups to select the most suitable instrument depending on their unique needs, including the need for a general overview of hospitalist well-being, the need to identify specific drivers, or the need to evaluate the impact of an intervention.