Promoting Well-Being in Graduate Medical Education: Embracing Principles Rather Than “Recipe”

Rather than a “cookbook” approach utilizing specific well-being “recipes,” required programming, or plug-and-play curricula, we propose a set of guiding principles that we believe can undergird effective interventions. [...]if institutional leadership views well-being through the lens of mental health or psychological well-being, their interventions will be more likely to focus on those particular needs. [...]institutional assessments often focus narrowly on measuring resident burnout, stress, or other well-being indicators, tracking a small range of mental health outcomes rather than exploring broader social, physical, or integrated components of wellness [2]. [...]these types of measures [5] are merely indicators identifying symptoms of a problem, but not in themselves diagnostic of the underlying sources of the problem [6, 7]. [...]organization wellness efforts that provide mental health resources to all employees must align with GME and program-level policies that ensure access to confidential appointments during work hours and support individual resources to promote healthy lifestyles, fitness, and time away from work.