WellNext Scan
What is the WellNext Scan?
“A healthy doctor is a better doctor.”
To be able to work well and professionally fulfilled, also in the long term, it is essential for healthcare providers that they take care of their own health and vitality, in other words, their well-being. Moreover, research shows that vitality benefits the provision of high quality patient care.
Demanding and continuously changing working conditions, such as high workloads, administrative and/or emotional burdens, pressurize healthcare providers’ vitality. The WellNext Scan evaluates the vitality of medical specialists and residents within a department (hospital setting) or of teammembers of a general practice. The scan considers the influence of several environmental and individual factors on healthcare providers’ experienced vitality.
The WellNext Scan is based on The Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment. The questionnaire measures 4 domains, doctors’ (self) perceived vitality, and three influencing factors: cultural context, organizational context, and individual strengths and resources. The scan measures how healthcare providers perceive the influencing factors and whether there is room to discuss the well-being domains within the department or group.
The vitality of healthcare providers has become an evident part of the professionalism of medical specialists and residents and of teammembers of general practices. In the Netherlands, in postgraduate medical education, explicit attention for doctors’ vitality is demanded in hospital audits. Many hospitals have developed and offer interventions to doctors who want or must work to improve their vitality. It can be helpful to use the WellNext Scan before intervening to better align the needs of doctors and their departments and of teammembers of general practices with interventions provided by the hospital or practice.
Evaluation takes place using web-based questionnaires. There is a separate questionnaire for the hospital setting and for general practice. All doctors (medical specialists and/or residents) of a department or all teammembers of a general practice fill in a questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of 45 short statements that can be scored on Likert-type scales. The questionnaire only takes a few minutes, and there is ‘free text’ space to clarify the scores. The Perito Professional Performance platform entirely automates conducting the questionnaires and generates one WellNext report per department or per practice. If both medical specialists and residents have completed a questionnaire (in the hospital setting), the results of both groups will be fed back separately in the report.
The WellNext Scan has been developed for doctors: medical specialists and residents can use it. Each doctor completes a questionnaire. Also, the WellNext Scan is now available for general practices. Each teammember of a general practice completes a questionnaire.
WellNext Scan participation is anonymous for all participants. In the WellNext report, the results for medical specialists and residents are reported separately, provided that sufficient respondents per group have participated. Only the number of doctors or teammembers who completed the questionnaire is stated. Other data, such as gender or year of education, are not included in the report; this data is anonymized and may be used for scientific research.
After the pre-agreed measurement period, the WellNext report is generated automatically. The report can be downloaded by the ‘administrator’ of the measurement, usually – depending on the organization – the team leader or department chair.
The WellNext Scan has been developed according to the Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment (Stanford University, CA, USA). For the operationalization of the influencing factors, scientifically validated constructs have been used where possible. The Professional Performance & Compassionate Care research groups (Amsterdam UMC) developed the WellNext Scan in collaboration with doctors.