Introducing the Mayo WBI and supporting wellbeing with Dr Una Harrington

Dr Harrington’s talk will encompass what it could look like to mould meaningful wellbeing strategies for your workplace, how the Mayo Wellbeing Index could fit into that strategy. She will also share some of what she has learned on her slightly atypical path in wellbeing advocacy over the last few years.

Wellbeing and performance are linked across all aspects of life. Wellness, Resilience and Performance in Emergency Medicine (WRaP-EM) is a global wellbeing curriculum, cofounded by Dr Harrington that has free modules anyone can complete. Wellbeing strategies need to start with a slow burn. You can do things at every level, as an individual by having a GP and providing yourself with food, as a department by having wellbeing on the agenda, as an executive by connecting with your staff, come to the coalface on busy days. The Mayo Wellbeing Index can be introduced for measuring the mean distress score across a group and be used to track a trajectory of an intervention. It is an online assessment tool, with nine questions across six dimensions of distress and wellbeing. Using this tool has implications for the individual and the organisation and you need to know what you are going to do with this information.

About Dr Una Harrington

Dr Una Harrington is an Emergency Physician at the QEII Hospital in Brisbane. She is the medical lead of the QEII ED multi-disciplinary ED Wellness Interest Group, which recently won the 2021 ACEM Wellbeing award. She sits on both Q Health and ACEM committees for Staff Wellbeing related issues. She is also the co-founder and lead of Wellness, Resilience and Performance in Emergency Medicine (wrapem.org) She is a proud Irish expat, wife to an affable surgeon and mum to a voracious toddler.

It is her strong belief that staff wellbeing is inextricably linked to performance. And that this concept of ‘optimal performance’ applies not only to the quality of our patient care, but also to the quality of our lives outside the workplace too.

Dr Una Harrington

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