The wellness program for medical faculty at the University of Ottawa: a work in progress.

These are the duties of a physician: First... to heal his mind and to give help to himself before giving it to anyone else. — Epitaph of an Athenian physician, 2 AD S uicide, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and marital discord can be the unfortunate outcomes of workplace distress. The medical profession is not immune. Researchers have long recognized that physicians may have even higher risks for these problems than nonphysicians. 1–5 In a 1993 survey of Canadian physicians carried out by the Medical Post, 76% of those surveyed reported experiencing negative stress, 65% reported increasing stress over the previous 5 years, 31% had been depressed , and 7% had thought of suicide. 6 Much attention has been focused on interventions for the impaired physician in practice, 7–9 but scant attention has been paid to the stresses and needs of academic physicians. The lack of protection against the wrath of distress even in the " ivory tower " was brought home to the medical faculty at the University of Ottawa by a serious mental health problem that beset a highly respected faculty member several years ago. In response to this crisis, the Task Force on Faculty Stress was formed in 1995 under the auspices of the then dean of medicine, with the 2 of us as cochairs. This project has been supported and enhanced through the efforts of the current dean. The goals of the task force were: • to increase faculty awareness of stress and strategies for wellness; • to develop an early detection, outreach and intervention program that faculty would use; and • to develop department and faculty interventions to decrease work-related distress , including a shift to a better balance between work and family life. In this article we describe the development of the first 2 phases of the wellness program. The dean of medicine and the 2 cochairs of the task force selected the initial members of the task force to take into account concerns raised by faculty members during informal focus group discussions. Faculty members indicated that the task force would not be credible if it was based within only one department, such as psychiatry , if it had solely professional stress experts, or if the task force members had not experienced the stress of academic medicine. Furthermore, many faculty members also noted that there must be high-level support for the task force (from the …