With 52 percent of surgeons reporting burnout, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) is committed to fostering well-being, resilience, and work-life integration for surgeons at every career stage. Through education, resources, tools, and advocacy, the ACS fosters and encourages surgeons’ health and well-being to ensure they have the physical and mental strength necessary to support their professional pursuits and provide optimal patient care.
At a systems level, the ACS advocates for workplace cultures that support optimal work-life integration for surgeons. By providing education, resources, and tools, the ACS Surgeon Well-Being Program strives to minimize the stigma surrounding burnout; address adverse effects of decreased surgeon well-being, including signs and symptoms associated with burnout and environment culture; promote resilience; increase work-life integration by supporting resources that aid the individual surgeon and their family and friends; and advocate for systems-level change at the local, regional, national, and international levels within programs, health care systems, hospitals, institutions, and government agencies on practices and policies that affect well-being.
Physician Well-Being Index
As a member of the ACS, you have access to the Physician Well-Being Index. This validated, confidential tool provides an opportunity for you to better understand your overall well-being and identify areas of risk compared with physicians and residents across the nation, and access local and national resources that are targeted to you based on your results. The tool is 100 percent anonymous; your individual score will not be shared with anyone. The assessment takes an average of two minutes or less to complete and results are available immediately. The Physician Well-Being Index tracks your results over time, so you can retake the assessment as often as you like, and it allows the user to set personalized reminders to reassess well-being and to correlate changes in well-being results to life and practice events. Access the Physician Well-Being Index.
The Surgeon Well-Being Program maintains a repository of resources on surgeon well-being. This repository contains information on articles, webinars, and tool kits focused on creating and maintaining well-being and preventing, identifying, and managing burnout. The resources explore the various drivers and factors of surgeon well-being and burnout at the individual and systemic level. These resources are accessible through the ACS website.
Surgeon well-being webinars
The Surgeon Well-Being Program launched its webinar program in January 2021. The webinars focus on engaging the surgeon community in discussing surgeon well-being, issues affecting well-being, challenges and barriers to increasing well-being, and tips and tools to manage well-being. All past webinars are available on-demand and include Reframing Surgeon Well-Being: How the Trauma Model Informs Approaches to Well-Being Solutions at Systemic Levels and Managing Microaggressions: What to Do When It Gets Personal, a two-part webinar series. Access past webinars and learn about future webinars.
Well-being and COVID-19 resources
The Surgeon Well-Being Program provides weekly articles featuring content focused on well-being topics and coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) through the ACS Bulletin Brief. Past articles focused on eight dimensions of well-being: mindfulness, time management, sleep management, gratitude, managing stress and anxiety, and more. Explore past articles in the Bulletin Brief archives, and look for future articles in the weekly Bulletin Brief distributed each Tuesday from the ACS. In addition to the weekly Bulletin Brief articles, the Surgeon Well-Being Program offers a repository of resources related to well-being and COVID-19. Explore these resources today.
