Impact of wellness indicators on intellectual dimensions of medical teachers of Karachi: Findings from cross sectional study.

OBJECTIVE: To measure impact of social, spiritual, occupational, physical, financial and emotional wellness on intellectual wellness of medical teachers. METHODS: The cross-sectional study was conducted at 8 medical universities in the Sindh province of Pakistan from January 2012 to December 2014, and comprised faculty members. Using a self-administered questionnaire, teachers' responses on physical, emotional, social, spiritual, intellectual, occupational and financial spokes of the wellness wheel that were graded on a 4-point Likert scale. Generalised linear models were executed to find the best predictive scores for intellectual wellness. RESULTS: Out of 300 subjects approached, 261(87%) returned the questionnaire fully completed. Of them, 86(33%) were males and 175(67%) were females. Occupational wellness followed by spiritual, financial and emotional wellness depicted significantly high correlation with IW (p<0.05). Adjusted analysis revealed significant effects of spiritual, financial and occupational wellness (p<0.05). Findings of Models 1 and 2 suggested that holding the effect of other wellness subscales, intellectual wellness increased up to 0.485 score and 0.245 score due to occupational and spiritual wellness (p<0.05) respectively, while financial wellness was not significant (p>0.05). In the final model, occupational wellness effect increased to 0.504 score and spiritual wellness effect projected to 0.273 score for intellectual wellness (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Amongst all the spokes of the wellness wheel, occupational, financial, social, emotional and spiritual wellness improved mental capabilities of medical teachers to overcome the challenges for acquiring intellectual wellness. However, wellness at workplace played the major role in enhancing intellectual proficiencies.