Dr Mila Felder: Supporting Well-Being in Oncology Care Using Surveys

The main goal of these surveys is to identify which areas of well-being needs to be focused on within a health care organization, says Mila Felder, MD, FACEP, emergency physician and vice president for Well-Being for All Teammates, Advocate Health.

Transcript

In envisioning a work environment where everyone thrives, what specific measures or indicators does Advocate Health use to assess the success of its well-being initiatives?

Historically, Advocate Health in the last 4 or 5 years has evolved so much. We have used a variety, a multitude of tools. Those tools included specific targeted surveys for physicians. Like I mentioned, the Professional Well-Being Academic Consortium (PWAC) survey was what we used in the Midwest [and the] AMA Organizational Biopsy that was done in the Southeast, [which] allowed us to receive the gold Joint medicine award. That was a separate survey for a separate population of clinicians. Then there was an engagement survey and the EMR [electronic medical record] survey—a variety of surveys and tools.

There's a lot of survey fatigue everywhere in health care. In the last year, since coming together as one big Advocate Health, we have transitioned a lot of those tools into a single survey platform. We're using an anniversary survey that's only 6 questions [that] asks a lot about the leadership and supportive leadership, and a question about the likelihood [you would] recommend Advocate Health [as a place to work].

It allows us to get that biopsy at the time when somebody has just celebrated their anniversary with Advocate. How do they feel about the organization? Because that human experience should be what our goal is, independent of if it's a teammate, physician, nurse, cafeteria worker, or patient. We want to get that experience to be right. And then, having a once-a-year safety survey or annual survey that allows a bigger biopsy with very specific well-being questions, workplace safety questions, nursing well-being questions, and clinician questions. Because some of those experiences need to be customizable.

We'll use those 2 surveys to measure the performance. The plan is to use the results of those surveys to identify [which] areas most need support and take our newly created catalog of all the well-being interventions and offer that to those leaders that need it most, while supporting the middle of the organization [who are] doing well or outstandingly well with just the standard toolkit but offering very specific support.

So, our approach to using survey measures and tools is to identify areas most likely to suffer from burnout or low professional fulfillment, independent of what they do, and elevate the leadership through giving them specific support, sharing the numbers, and allowing [them] to use the tools, and then stepping through it with them.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.