The Well-Being Index Partner
What does make a difference to doctor wellbeing and performance?
We are interested in how coaching can alter doctor wellbeing and performance. So we are constantly seeking ways to measure the impact of our work.We are really delighted to be partnering with Beamtree who offer the Well-Being Index (WBI) to healthcare workers in Australia and New Zealand. The doctors we work with can now monitor their wellbeing over time and use their own individual trend lines as part of their reflective practice in coaching and elsewhere. You can run your own long term study of yourself, for yourself.
The WBI was developed at the Mayo Clinic to measure the wellbeing of healthcare workers. This validated tool gives you an opportunity to understand your wellbeing and any areas of risk, compared to other healthcare workers across Australia and New Zealand. And it gives you easy access to relevant, local and national resources. Your information is completely de-identified and 100% anonymous. We commend this tool to you and hope doctors everywhere will invest a few minutes every month to build their own bank of evidence about their wellbeing.
You may already be using the WBI through your workplace. We think this is an essential tool to understand where and how we collectively, systemically, use our energy going forward to help sustain the medical workforce and develop better healthcare workplaces.
When you use the WBI to monitor your own state of wellbeing, you can elect to do the short survey of 9 questions, monthly or quarterly. It’s important to do the survey regularly and over time if you want to be evidence driven. As humans we are unreliable when it comes to remembering our own data accurately, due to a combination of low self awareness, distractibility and the real limitations of memory and various biases. Just try and remember exactly what you ate four days ago! Using the WBI periodically will give you a trend line and help you make proactive choices for your long term benefit.
Doctors working with Coaching for Doctors (C4D) who do not want to log in to the Well Being Index (WBI) via their employer, can begin their personal well being monitoring via our WBI code that we will share with you when you commence working with us. If you choose to use the WBI to monitor your own wellbeing, you can also elect to have your deidentified data shared with C4D. Both of these decisions are personal choices. We do not know who of our clients is choosing to use the WBI.
We encourage doctors everywhere to use the WBI so that you can actively reflect and take action on your real time data to improve your well being. We are also interested to look for collective and systemic trends in doctor well being over time, using Australian and New Zealand data, instead of relying on data from elsewhere that may or may not be relevant. We are curious to see what emerges. The more doctors using the WBI the more relevant the data becomes to the whole medical population.
We are also interested in this data as a long term project looking at the sub-population of doctors who use coaching. Using the WBI is entirely optional and up to you whether you bring your personal data to share with your coach or not.
As a psychologist I am interested in patterns of behaviour in individuals and in groups.I am really very keen to be using local data when we talk about burnout rates and wellbeing in Australian and New Zealand doctors. I hope you will join me in this important project. Without some current local data our discussions and conclusions otherwise, are at best speculative and relate to some other cultural population, that may or may not be relevant.
May you be well
The Thriving Doctor
Sharee Johnson’s book The Thriving Doctor is available in all good bookstores or online.
Sharee has been coaching doctors since 2014, find out more about her work