Session Description:

Given the rates of professional burnout combined with the negative impacts of COVID-19 on healthcare providers, a peer support program was designed to support professional well-being.  CIRCLE Peer Talk and CIRCLE Peer Text groups allowed peers to connect with peers, to reflect and discuss what it means to be “well at work” and important issues that might not ordinarily be addressed in the day-to-day work.  

These groups “meet” synchronously (via an online platform or face-to-face) or asynchronously (by text) every other week.  Learn about the program components, successes, outcomes, and impacts on professional well-being and patient encounters.  

Presenters:

Chantal Brazeau, M.D. | Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine, New Jersey Medical School; Assistant Dean for Faculty Vitality, New Jersey Medical School and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Chief Wellness Officer, Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences

Dr. Brazeau has over 25 years of experience in the field of health professional well-being. She has taught about well-being and burnout, conducted local and national survey-based studies on medical student, faculty and physician well-being and presented at national and international venues on these topics.  As the inaugural Chief Wellness Officer at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, she works with school, university and hospital leadership teams to explore and lead the development and implementation of wellness initiatives for faculty and health care providers. 

Ping-Hsin Chen, Ph.D. | Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, New Jersey Medical School  

Dr. Chen is an experienced mixed methods researcher with extensive experience in intervention studies, community service-learning programs, quality assurance, and quality improvement projects, and clinical trials. Dr. Chen is proficient in building and managing secure online surveys and databases and using specialized statistical software packages for data analysis. She has provided quantitative and qualitative analyses and evaluations of several surveys on faculty and health professional well-being. 

Manasa S. Ayyala, MD | Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine; Director, The Healthcare Foundation Center for Humanism and Medicine, New Jersey Medical School 

Dr. Ayyala completed a fellowship in medical education and has formal training in qualitative methodology and experience conducting large survey research. Her work exploring bullying in residency training was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2019.   She has experience in physician wellness interventions spanning the learning continuum from undergraduate medical education to faculty wellness and currently serves as Faculty Vitality Champion for the Department of Medicine and Chair for the Department of Medicine Wellness Committee.  Additionally, she has personal experience with engaging in informal peer support through a texting platform.