Wellness during COVID-19

This "Comprehensive Toolkit for Supporting Our Own During COVID-19," from the Office of Well-Being and Resilience at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was created "to share [Mount Sinai's] approach to addressing the basic, psychosocial, and mental health needs of our workforce."

This engaging and interactive educational toolkit, part of AMA STEPS Forward, is designed for users to be able to:

• identify common stressors the health care workforce and individual health care workers face before, during, and after a crisis,
• create a plan for navigating all stages of a crisis in a way that promotes workforce well-being, and
• employ methods to overcome stressors and establish a resilient organization.

The Mount Sinai Health System task force identified three priority areas central to promoting and maintaining the well-being of their entire workforce during the pandemic:

• meeting basic daily needs;
• enhancing communications for delivery of current, reliable, and reassuring messages; and
• developing robust psychosocial and mental health support options.

Posttraumatic growth does not minimize the seriousness and severity of what has happened but can emerge from adversity through active management following the important process of grieving.

Before effective approaches to support health care professionals can be developed, it is critical to understand their specific sources of anxiety and fear. Focusing on addressing those concerns, rather than teaching generic approaches to stress reduction or resilience, should be the primary focus of support efforts.

In a disaster, the size of the psychological "footprint" greatly exceeds the size of the medical "footprint." What we can do going forward?

This slide deck centers on three objectives: 

• Identify the difference between individual and organizational resilience,
• Understand what systems-level changes facilitate individual and organizational resilience, and
• Identify systems approaches to promote resilience during times of crisis.

This resource focuses on the following objectives:

• Explore why self-care is not selfish, 
• Share personal stories and strategies to cultivate self-care , 
• Share frameworks to develop an individualized skill set to promote self-care, and
• Role model, teach and integrate these skills while at work.

This resource is designed so that learners will:

• Help to identify core components of a well-being framework to address systems and individual supports for well-being, 
• Reflect upon major stressors and threats to well-being in the midst of a crisis, 
• Consider how to adapt an enduring well-being framework to inform pandemic or crisis approach to support well-being, 
• Develop an approach to direct appropriate support resources accordingly at evolving stressors in the midst of a crisis. 

ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being Stuart Slavin, MD, MEd, and well-being scholars from across the U.S. examine the impact of the Omicron Variant on the mental health and emotional well-being of residents/fellows, faculty members, and others in the GME community, including implications for reimagining GME for the future.