ONE YEAR OF ADFM’S JOY IN PRACTICE INITIATIVE

As health care transformation accelerates in the United States, the problem of physician burnout has worsened and is now receiving national attention. In family medicine, wellness, burnout, and resilience among our care teams were topics of considerable interest at the last several ADFM Winter Meetings. In 2016, discussions around the implications of physician and staff burnout for our Departments of Family Medicine (DFMs) and what DFMs can do to create practices that enhance wellness and support individual and team resilience became a major theme of the meeting. Christine Sinsky, MD, Vice President for Professional Satisfaction at the American Medical Association, presented on “Joy in Practice,” and after a very enthusiastic response to her presentation, ADFM was challenged to consider how we as an organization can work collaboratively to learn how better to do this in our academic environments.

Within ADFM’s 2015–2018 strategic plan, 2 goals are related to finding joy in practice: (1) assisting DFMs to transform their clinical delivery enterprise to advance higher care quality; and (2) leadership development with a specific focus on programs to build resilience of chairs, of administrators, and in DFMs to realize the full potential of Family Medicine for America’s Health (FMAHealth). Following the 2016 Winter Meeting, the ADFM Healthcare Delivery Transformation (HCDT) Committee was tasked with finding strategies for creating a collaborative effort around joy in practice for ADFM. Achieving “joy” in what we do to advance care is one facet of being able to sustain our efforts at providing improved health. This effort, ADFM’s “Joy in Practice Initiative,” has included the creation of a new listserv for individuals in departments who are interested in collaborating and learning more about efforts around the country to support wellness in DFMs. We have also reached out to colleagues in the Society of General Internal Medicine to join our initiative.

The cornerstone of the Initiative is a series of quarterly webinars presented by individuals from the ADFM community and our partners. Each webinar showcases innovative practice features intended to improve system and individual wellness and increase satisfaction with practice. To date, webinar topics have included various methods of team documentation (scribing); an update on the AAMC’s Coordinating Optimal Referral Experiences program and the background on the e-consultation strategy; strategies on optimizing team care; using EHR data to quantify “spend” on EHR tasks; and a method for panel size weighting. ADFM has made these webinars available to all who are interested; watch the webinars, join the listserv for conversation and announcements of future webinars, and learn more here: http://www.adfm.org/Members/Webinarsresources.

An additional feature of the Initiative was the intent to highlight efforts underway by individual departments at the 2017 Winter Meeting. This led to a very successful and well-received overall meeting theme of “Joy and Effectiveness in the Work of Family Medicine: Now and in the Future.” Sessions focused not only on joy in practice, but on joy in each of the main aspects included in a DFM’s mission: research, education, clinical care, and the administrative infrastructure to keep all of these pieces moving. More about the 2017 Winter Meeting can be found in ADFM’s commentary in the May/June 2017 issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

ADFM has several DFM Chairs and leaders involved in the Association of Chiefs and Leaders of General Internal Medicine’s WELL (Wellness Engaged Longitudinal Leaders) Program and we have been promoting the AMA’s STEPS Forward effort as a resource. We look forward to future collaborations around similar efforts and hope that our own efforts can be a resource to the Family of Family Medicine.

All these initiatives can and will help with the problem of physician burnout, and help us get the joy back in doing what we do best, providing the very best in care for our patients, their families, and our communities.

• © 2017 Annals of Family Medicine, Inc.