Emergency Medicine WELLNESS WEEK – An international collaboration & call to action!
| “Dear colleagues. The unbearable has happened…last Friday we discovered that one of our residents was tragically taken from us… It appears that the resident took their own life in response to acute grief…” – Dr. Christopher Doty (Program Director, University of Kentucky EM Residency Program) |
Calling ALL Emergency Medicine (EM) physicians – residents and attendings alike! It shouldn’t take Dr. Doty’s story or the loss by the resident’s family, friends, and colleagues suffered in order for us to recognize the importance of wellness. Our specialty is known to be high risk and it is surprising that we are so late to the game to try and change that. Well, together we can. We are a strong group of people. We see, hear, touch, and smell things that would make the average person nauseous. We are problem solvers and leaders.
This year’s JGME-ALiEM Hot Topics in Medical Education journal club features the systematic review on residency wellness recently published in the 
“The hardest thing for me was trying to find time to do things aside from being a resident. When you’re working six 12 hours shifts in a week, there’s only so much time left in the day to do anything else. Especially in the winter, you wake up, you get to work before the sun comes up, you work a 12 hour shift, you leave, and the sun’s gone. By the time you get home, you have enough time to wash the grime off, shovel a sandwich in your mouth, and pass out. And there was nothing else except for that.”
Unless you are living under a rock, many healthcare and public media platforms are talking about the insidious problems with burnout in the health professions world. One thought leader out there is especially vocal about wellness, resiliency, and mindfulness — Dr. Zubin Damania (alter ego: 