Background

Physician dissatisfaction can start in medical school, and professional and personal wellness can worsen over time (6, 11–13).

Barriers to seeking help are widespread in training culture (14). The culture of residency is a setup for burnout due to a culture of perfectionism, high levels of stress from heavy workloads and long hours, the challenging nature of working with people who are sick, and life changes that happen to young physicians. In the field of obstetrics and gynecology (ob-gyn), physicians are at a higher risk of burnout (4, 10). It's time to move beyond the well-documented crisis of physician burnout (1, 2).

Wellness means caring for the caregiver to encourage professional satisfaction and humanism in medicine. Wellness is more than only recognizing and promoting treatment for mental illness and substance abuse. It is a daily practice of behaviors that promote health within the physician and the medical community.

It has been demonstrated that humanistic physicians work deliberately at maintaining their connection to the work of caring for patients and take pride and pleasure in this level of professionalism (15). A wide range of interventions to enhance wellness during residency promise to help trainees learn skills to support their own wellness (17,18).

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has set out a clear imperative to training programs to focus on the clinical learning environment, with emphasis on residency wellness (16). The dialogue in academic medicine is changing from documenting the problem of burnout to searching for ways to enhance the learning environment throughout their careers, for the benefit of patients and physicians alike (8,9). Thus, it is critical to understand the conversation about wellness taking place in the ob-gyn clinical learning environment in order to understand how to improve physician wellness across the spectrum of training and into clinical practice.