Well-being Program

Mission and Vision

Are You a Patient?

The Faculty & Staff Well-being Program casts a clear vision that well-being is an organizational responsibility in addition to an individual one. Rather than ask any one individual member of our community to shoulder their stress alone, we hope to lift our entire institution by tackling cultural and structural barriers to well-being and making work life better for all of us in meaningful, concrete ways.

The Keck School has adopted the Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment as a guiding philosophy. This model consists of three domains:

Model of Professional Fulfillment
Stanford Model of Professional Fulfillment
  • Personal Resilience:  the individual skills, behaviors, and attitudes that contribute to physical, emotional, and professional well-being.
  • Culture of Wellness:  organizational work environment, values and behaviors that promote self-care, personal and professional growth, and compassion that physicians and scientists have for themselves, their colleagues and their patients and beneficiaries of their innovations
  • Efficiency of Practice:  workplace systems, processes, and practices that promote safety, quality, effectiveness, positive patient and colleague interactions, and work-life balance

Strategic Plan

The Well-being Program has crafted a strategic plan to help guide the Keck School on a path to further prioritize and improve the well-being of all constituents. Broadly, our goals are to:

  • Cast a clear vision for faculty & staff well-being
  • Establish coalitions of well-being collaborators to enact local-level work
  • Establish well-being metrics to monitor progress
  • Develop well-being guidance, resources, and programming
  • Support meaningful interventions to address well-being challenge areas

View our strategic goals and measures of success in more detail here.

LISTEN-SORT-EMPOWER

The Well-being program helps units utilize the practice of LISTEN-SORT-EMPOWER, a simple, effective team-based approach to eradicating the root causes of professional burnout. LISTEN-SORT-EMPOWER is a broadly applicable model adapted from the Listen-Act-Develop approach for physician engagement, used for decades by Mayo Clinic. The LISTEN-SORT-EMPOWER model begins with the assumption that systems and behaviors—not people—are the source of many work- and school-place problems. Using this collaborative problem-solving technique results in a friendlier work environment and a cohesive team that is able to meet the daily challenges that arise.

Want a consultation on how to use the LISTEN-SORT-EMPOWER model with your team? Just send us an email, or have your well-being champion or other leadership reach out: wellbeing@med.usc.edu.

Learn more about Listen-Sort-Empower

We recognize that interventions
are not one-size-fits-all.

We work diligently with all stakeholders to tailor solutions to specific populations. The Well-being Program works with individuals and groups across the school to help advance its mission. View a full list of our partners here.

We assume responsibility for regularly assessing the well-being status of our groups and sharing this information with the community and local leaders in a timely and transparent manner. We serve as a liaison to the Dean’s office and advocate for well-being to be considered in all major institution-wide decisions. We also work to build the infrastructure, relationships, and enthusiasm necessary to enact widespread change across our culture and systems.