Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 31, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 31, 2023 - Dec 26, 2023
Date Accepted: Nov 6, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Measuring self-reported wellbeing of physicians using The Wellbeing Thermometer, a pilot study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Advancements in medical science have focused largely on patient care, often overlooking the wellbeing of healthcare professionals. This oversight has consequences: not only are healthcare professionals prone to mental and physical health challenges, but the quality of patient care also suffers as a result. Such concerns are exacerbated by unprecedented crises like the Covid-19 pandemic. Compared to other sectors, healthcare professionals report high incidence of stress, depression, and suicide, amongst other factors that have a significant negative impact on wellbeing.
Objective:
Given these challenges, the development of a tool specifically designed to be used in clinical settings to measure the wellbeing of healthcare professionals is required.
Methods:
A pilot study was carried out to measure wellbeing in a cohort of 148 physicians, using the newly developed Wellbeing Thermometer. The aim of the tool is to allow respondents to develop an individual sense of ‘wellbeing intelligence’ thus supporting healthcare professionals to have better insight and control over their wellbeing and how to manage it.
Results:
The tool demonstrated good internal consistency; the Cronbach’s α in the current study was .84 for the total scale.
Conclusions:
Results demonstrated that the Wellbeing Thermometer can be used to gather intelligence of staff wellbeing to facilitate change in policies and practices across healthcare organisations.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.