Abstract
BACKGROUND: Emergency Medicine has a high rate of physician burnout. Studies have shown that exercise and social activities have positive impacts on physician wellness. Many residency programs have implemented initiatives aimed to positively impact the emotional, physical, intellectual, and social aspects of wellness. OBJECTIVES: The purpose was to improve EM physician wellness by implementing a voluntary team exercise competition into an EM residency program wellness curriculum over 3 months. METHODS: This study utilized a voluntary survey to compare wellness pre- and post-competition. The population studied included 33 EM residents and 28 EM attending participants. Residents were grouped based on pre-established residency “Houses” and attendings assigned to one of these Houses at random. Participants earned 1 point for every 30 minutes of exercise with the winning team earning a residency funded “House Party” at the end of the 3-month period. Data from the survey was analyzed using a 2 Sample T-Test to assess for significance. The mean values of the pre/post data were compared to determine if an aim of 25% improvement in wellness was met. RESULTS: Resident survey results showed that 100% exercised more during this competition and 100% would participate again. There was improvement in wellbeing (p = 0.026), energy (p = 0.014), and sleep (p = 0.025); these areas all also met the aim of improving by more than 25% after this 3-month competition (25%, 36%, 33% respectively). 80% of residents felt that their increased exercise positively impacted their wellness at work. CONCLUSIONS: EM residents had improvement in wellness, energy, and sleep after implementing a team exercise competition. A majority of participants felt this competition encouraged an increase in their exercise and stated they would participate again. Limitations include confounding variables impacting wellness such as changing weather or rotations, low survey response rate, and survey type.
