Residents know best: applying human-centered design to a general surgery residency wellness program

Physician wellness is important for delivering high-quality care. Initiatives to understand resident wellness often come in the form of surveys, and solutions are often implemented using a top-down approach with uncertain effects on wellness. Human-centered design (HCD) offers an alternative approach by drawing on the experiences of residents to provide relevant insights. We describe using HCD to understand the definition of wellness to our residents and create a wellness initiative.

A HCD framework was used to develop wellness initiatives. Residents created journey maps by graphing their relative levels of wellness over time, and then interviewed one another to discover what wellness means to their partner. Interview notes were collected and qualitatively analyzed for common themes. Two ideation sessions were held for residents to brainstorm ideas to answer a generative prompt “how might we…” improve one of the themes. Residents then tested their ideas via small-scale experiments.

Twenty-five residents participated in the journey map and peer interview exercise. Common themes that emerged were camaraderie, fulfillment at work, protection of personal relationships, time usage, and general stressors. During the ideation sessions, over 100 possible experiments were generated based on these themes. Many of these experiments were then trialed on a small scale.

HCD provides an actionable framework for curriculum development, especially as it offers a resident-centered approach to improve wellness. The in-depth interviews identified themes that would not have been captured via survey. Insights generated by the HCD discussions helped guide our wellness program development with further iterations of projects planned.