Dr Susannah Ward

What does wellbeing mean to you at an individual level?

Individual wellbeing means living with some level of self-mastery (understanding and accepting yourself, knowing your holistic health needs, and managing them adaptively most of the time), and functioning optimally, with meaning and purpose despite challenges.

Wellbeing is holistic and multifaceted. Rather than a subjective appraisal of affect, wellbeing reflets a person's overall health, function and life satisfaction. It requires a healthy, adaptive and caring relationship with oneself, their environment, and community. It is deeply interconnected with the wellbeing of others and the environment. Wellbeing flourishes when a person lives aligned with their values, can meet their holistic needs, and has access to the necessary resources and support to thrive.

Achieving wellbeing means integrating a sense of self, finding contentment in one's abilities and participation in life, while accepting limits and embracing potential. Safety – physical, psychological, and social – is fundamental.

What does wellbeing mean to you an organisational level?

At the organisational level, wellbeing thrives in a physically and psychologically safe workplace where staff have access to the resources and support needed to meet the demands of their role and sustain wellbeing.

Supportive governance and a nurturing culture make wellbeing a shared responsibility where staff feel and are enabled to flourish in their career, health, and personal lives. Systems are conducive to sustainable workloads and efficient practices.

What can an organisation do to support physician wellbeing?

Organisations need to measure their staff's wellbeing through validated tools and surveys. There need to be avenues for communication between frontline workers and executive leadership, so issues are addressed efficiently and staff feel heard, validated, and engaged in positive change, which is conducive to wellbeing. 

Leaders need skills training and support to ensure staff are treated with compassion and interpersonal interactions foster psychological safety. Staff need access to healthy food, fresh water, breaks, leave and healthcare. Leaders should role model well-being behaviours. I think offering free staff mindfulness, yoga and wellbeing education sessions send a clear cultural message.

All leading hospitals and training hospitals need a chief medical wellness officer to develop, implement and monitor wellbeing interventions targeted to hotspots and drivers of staff burnout etc.

Dr David Beaumont

What does wellbeing mean to you at an individual level?

As an Occupational Physician, I work with many employer organisations who don’t understand what wellbeing actually is. That’s a stark admission, isn’t it? Sadly, wellbeing is often understood in the negative, as concern for lack of wellbeing. I find this to be true for many of the patients I work with too. It’s actually really simple: Wellbeing is feeling good and functioning well. That’s my favourite definition of wellbeing. It comes from Professor Felicia Huppert. Her full definition is very powerful, and something to be desired:

"Wellbeing is the combination of feeling good and functioning well; the experience of positive emotions such as happiness and contentment as well as the development of one’s potential, having some control over one’s life, having a sense of purpose, and experiencing positive relationships."

How powerful is that! And how much bigger than we traditionally perceive ‘health’?

I apply the four pillars of health in my own wellbeing plan, which I apply every day in my life. If I was to summarise, and provide four words for the four pillars, they would be Move, Enjoy, Love, Reflect:

Physical health

I ensure I move every day. Even if it’s only taking my dog for a walk. Ideally, and particularly at weekends, it also includes going to the swimming pool and cycling.

Psychological health

I conscious seek to enjoy life, by doing things that bring me joy. Psychological health exists when the balance of our thoughts are more positive than negative. We can make choices to influence this. It’s an active process!

Emotional health

It’s too easy for our close personal relationships to run on default mode. I consciously seek to bring more love into mine. That too is an active process under our control!

Spiritual health

As I look back prior to 10 years or so ago, I spent little or no time considering the big, deep questions of life: Who am I? Who am I meant to be? What am I meant to do? How do I contribute to the lives of others? Now I take time to reflect on these questions. I have learned to listen to my intuition, the ‘still small voice’ within. I have a daily meditation practice, in which I contemplate these questions (and hear answers!). But my most important reflection time is walking in nature.

What does wellbeing mean to you an organisational level?

Many organisations now have wellbeing programmes. Many achieve very little. The work of Dr Ray Fabius, an American Occupational Physician, has identified why – wellbeing programmes don’t work unless they're introduced in the context of a Culture of Health and Wellbeing.

The culture of an organisation is “the way we do things round here”. In other words, unless health and wellbeing is at the heart of everything the organisation is doing, and modelled from the top by the leadership, then ‘wellbeing programmes’ are likely to be simply tokenistic. How do healthcare settings do? I will leave that question hanging, for you to answer….

What can an organisation do to support physician wellbeing?

Organisations need to start by using the Huppert definition of wellbeing and use this as the desired outcome: “This is what we would wish our staff to achieve in their lives, and therefore for their experience of coming to work to add to their wellbeing (and certainly not to detract from it). How can we create the circumstances for it? By building a Culture of Health and Wellbeing, modelled by senior leadership. By following the blueprint described by Dr Tait Shanafelt in his seminal paper, ‘Physician Wellbeing 2.0’.”