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Woodruff Health Sciences Center’s Office of Well-Being launches inaugural well-being survey
Table displaying EmWell survey information

On Sept. 12, more than 37,000 people who work within the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC) received an email invitation to complete the inaugural WHSC well-being survey, marking the largest survey of its kind ever administered at Emory and nationally.

Designed to measure professional fulfillment, a sense of belonging, efficiency of work environment, culture, meaningfulness of work and other facets of team experience, the survey questions are provided by the Healthcare Professional Well-being Academic Consortium  (PWAC) — a group of 26 academic health care systems and hospitals with a shared vision of advancing the well-being of all people working in health care and health sciences settings.

“The data we collect from the confidential WHSC survey will help us know where we stand nationally and internally when it comes to workplace well-being,” says Tim Cunningham, RN, DrPH, the co-chief well-being officer at WHSC. “We’re one of the first institutions in the nation to survey our entire workforce. We do this because we understand that when our teams are well, our patients will be well.”

The WHSC Office of Well-Being (EmWELL) launched the inaugural WHSC Well-Being Survey, in partnership with PWAC and SullivanLuallin Group, after almost a full year of preparation. The survey planning process included many aspects — from identifying questions EmWELL wanted to include (most from a PWAC questions library, and some customized questions), to discerning the targeted list of people and thoughtfully determining the timing of the survey.

Several innovative aspects were unique to Emory in this roll out. For example, the EmWELL team collaborated with PWAC to create meaningfulness of work questions for non-clinical employees, which has historically only been evaluated in the clinical practice setting. Respondents also have the option to access the survey via QR code (in addition to more traditional route of email links), thus making it more inclusive for job roles that are not as active on email.

Nicolette Goularte, PhD, scientific program manager at Healthcare PWAC, says, “The EmWELL team has advocated at every turn to expand the scope and accessibility of their survey. Their thoughtful advances will inform future assessment and benchmarking possibilities across the consortium.”

Employees within WHSC (including Emory Healthcare) are encouraged to complete the survey before Oct. 22 (https://bit.ly/bewellWHSC2023) and submit a short video or quote to wellbeing@emory.edu about why they did for a chance to win a gift card. Answers will remain anonymous. 

EmWELL has also created a toolkit to help supervisors share information about the survey with their teams (https://bit.ly/helpPWAC).

“The information we obtain will be used to recommend actions that directly support the individuals of WHSC,” says Chad Ritenour, MD, co-chief well-being officer and chief medical officer at Emory University Hospital. “If we really want to improve organizational well-being, we have to measure it first.”


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