WORCESTER MEDICINE
Workforce Vitality
I’m OK-You OK? Best Efforts to Watch Over the Wellness of the Learners in the Three Mass Chan Graduate Schools
Michael Hirsh, MD
I
have been involved with the UMass Medical School since I first took a job as an academic pediatric surgeon there in 1986. Although I did take a nineyear break to hone my skills in Pittsburgh from 1992 to 2000, I returned in large part to Worcester because of the wonderful relationship that I always had with the medical school and its students. A lot of what I imparted to medical students was based on the negative role modeling that I had experienced as a trainee and later as a young attending. There was no focus on wellness or work/ life balance, or any of the catchphrases that one uses nowadays to show that there is a world outside the four walls of the hospital. I suppose the philosophies and approaches I took to both my work life and my home life did play a big part in what I shared with the students. They were always very receptive and always asked me how I continued working hard when there were so many obstacles in my way – i.e. short staffing; poor subspecialty representation to support multi system critically ill/ injured patients; inadequate administrative support for pediatric services. My standard answer was if you pick a career that you love, it doesn’t feel like work, so you can work like crazy, which I think I did. The generation of medical students coming up now, are not willing, ( justifiably so), to make the same imbalanced life part of their future. Despite the imbalance that I represented, Dean Terry Flotte tapped me in 2019 to start an Office of Health and Wellness Promotion within the Office of Student Life of the UMass Chan Medical School. At the time that I was opening this office, there was a great deal of concern about the level of
pressure being put on students with the Step One and Step Two exams, and how they greatly detracted from the level of enjoyment that the students had in their med school experiences. The first approach I embarked on in assessing the situation was partnering with an expert focus group leader, Dr. Kristin Mattocks, to evaluate representative students from all three grad schools about what stressed them and when. We also talked about what distressed them too. We have recognized financial stress detracts from overall wellness so we work closely with financial aid to assist students. We also work closely with Coaching services and Student Counseling Services to make sure that students who need extra help with coping skills or a safe place to speak freely about problems can get on board with these services promptly. One of the overarching themes that came from those focus group sessions was that students felt very isolated in the time that they were studying for their Steps, going for their nursing licensure, or completing a set of experiments in their lab, particularly if their lab work wasn’t going well. The isolation was something that I felt we could mitigate by establishing group experiences outside of a hospital. We therefore took the budget that was allotted to us and bought tickets for various events in Worcester and surrounding towns that might give the students an experience of calm, no-pressure fun. We had tickets that students could sign up for in groups to go to the Woo Sox, Mechanics Hall for Music Worcester, the Worcester Art Museum, and Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston. The rate that these tickets were gobbled up convinced me that we were on to something. We then planned welcoming ice cream socials and picnics and tried to emphasize the 3-school participation in these events. We also worked out a deal with the City of Worcester, where I serve as the Medical Director for the Division of Public Health, to rent out the ice-skating rink behind City Hall, called the Oval, for our three school students to enjoy for free. This included music, food, and skate rental. Nearly 200 students participated each year we did it. When the Pandemic arrived, the isolation became much more profound. But here an old maxim I have touted came mightily into play- “Advocacy prevents burnout”. As the word we were getting from Washington was that
Fall 2023
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