Well-being Assessment of Medical Professionals in Progressive Levels of Training: Derived from the WHO-5 Well-being Index.

ABSTRACT

The provision of quality health care is of utmost importance for a physician. Over the years, there has been much debate regarding work-life imbalance and physician burnout, which may, in turn, have adverse effects on the quality of care. Medical school students, residents, interview candidates for residency, and internal medicine faculty are all under a varying degree of stress, which may impact their personal and professional lives. We distributed questionnaires to investigate our hypothesis: Progression in training years leads to a decline in well-being. The main objective of our assessment was to help devise interventions to improve the quality of training and the productivity of internal medicine physicians. Understanding the emotional functioning of physicians will help us improve the learning environment and, in turn, have a positive impact in the future for medical professionals. Medical students are burdened with excessive loans for undergraduate and graduate studies, which contributes to higher rates of burnout, depression, and suicide among medical professionals, which can lead to a direct and negative impact on quality of care. Our study showed that well-being scores declined with increasing financial stress; they were also affected by the visa status and training background of our subjects as medical students.