What is The Well Doc Initiative?
A vehicle for supporting physician wellness
Physician wellness is an important responsibility shared by individual physicians, the medical profession, and healthcare systems. The Well Doc Initiative (comprised of “Well Doc Alberta” and “Well Doc Canada”) is a non-profit that advances a collaborative, co-operative approach to physician wellness by working with interested groups and organizations across Canada.
We aim to help physicians, physician groups, and healthcare system leaders embed policies, practices, and programs in their healthcare systems to proactively enhance the wellness of physicians across Canada.
Filling the Gap - Upstream Prevention
The Well Doc Initiative does NOT provide treatment or counselling for physicians in distress.
What Does The Well Doc Initiative Offer?
The Well Doc Initiative works with groups of physicians (e.g., divisions, departments, community clinics, or national organizations), residents, or medical students. We help these groups to implement best practices from the literature that have been shown to reduce work-related distress, such as burnout, and support groups in establishing workplaces that promote good mental health.
Four Programs of Focus
In the development of our core programming, an essential paper we drew upon was “A Blueprint for Organizational Strategies to Promote the Well-being of Health Care Professionals” by Shanafelt et al., that highlights core organizational strategies that every healthcare organization should have in place to support their members at the system level.
Our resources span four programs: peer support, physician wellness measurement, general education and development, and knowledge translation.
To learn more about our education session offerings, please visit our Session Offerings page.
Peer Support Program
We help groups of physicians to develop, train, launch, and sustain their own one-on-one physician-to-physician peer support teams. We do this using a four-step process.
Physician Wellness Measurement Program
We support the measurement of group's workplace wellness using a longitudinal quality improvement process designed to help them identify and make change at the system level.
General Education and Development Program
We offer various physician wellness education sessions tailored specifically to physicians. We refine the sessions to meet the unique needs of each group we work with.
Knowledge Translation Program
We offer general information sessions about The Well Doc Initiative, one-time consultations on various physician wellness topics, and longitudinal consultative processes for groups implementing system-level wellness programs. We also contribute to broader knowledge sharing in the field, through various avenues.
How Does The Well Doc Initiative Achieve Its Goals?
We use a co-operative model to augment education and prevention resources around physician wellness. Essential to this model are the contributions from our core team and our diverse collaborators across Canada, including physicians and professionals trained in other disciplines. The Well Doc Initiative is here to support groups when they feel ready to make change, offering partnership and expertise in a way that respects their timing and needs.
We developed a Theory of Change model has been developed that depicts a causal change of how specific activities and outputs we undertake within our organization will contribute to the intended impact within the healthcare system. To read more about how we achieve this, please visit Our Goals page.