Meet our Wellness Director
Working in healthcare is highly rewarding and highly stressful. That has been true for my entire career, but never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone in the Department of Medicine plays a critical healthcare role in supporting our missions of delivering the highest quality of care, training future healthcare providers, and creating new knowledge to improve that care. And each one of us is susceptible to the other pandemic, the pandemic of burnout.
I am grateful that our Department has taken an active approach to monitoring burnout and enhancing resilience for all of our employees. Recognizing that there are many factors that can tip the balance between stress and resilience leading to burnout, the Department seeks to address wellness at every level, from the individual to the institution, and beyond. We strive to enhance well-being in all of its domains through multiple pathways utilizing many types of communication, and we try to make it fun.
- Senior Advisor and Director of Wellness, John I. Kennedy Jr., MD
Wellness at UAB
We are fortunate that UAB is heavily invested in promoting wellness. With its organizational home in UAB Human Resources, the UAB Employee Wellness Program is active campus-wide with a strong emphasis on physical health, promoting active living and healthy eating as well as early detection and prevention of illness. Under the leadership of the Chief Wellness Officer, the School of Medicine provides access to the Well-Being Index, a scientifically validated tool for detection of symptoms of burnout that also offers guidance to specific resources for help. You can sign up for the Well-Being Index here.
You will be prompted to enter an access code based on your profession. Please find your access code by group/role below:
- Faculty: UAB FACULTY
- APP: UAB APP
- Trainee (Resident/Fellow/Other Trainee): UAB TRAINEE
- Medical Students: UAB MEDICAL STUDENTS
- Nurses: UAB NURSES
- Employee/Staff*: UAB MEDICINE
The DOM Wellness Program has strong ties to these programs and will coordinate efforts to build integrated and complementary programs. Additonal wellness resources can also be found on the UAB Medicine intranet.
Wellness is a broad and complex topic. Therefore, the DOM Wellness Program addresses wellness in a holistic fashion, focusing attention on physical, psychological and professional factors that promote well-being and resilience and mitigate burnout. The program’s mission is parallel to the DOM Mission and Vision Statement, that is “to create a Department where people work as well, as long and as happily as possible."
Keep up with Dr. Well-Be
Twitter - @JIKennedyJr
LinkedIn - John Kennedy
Wordpress Blog
Instagram - @jikennedyjr