Wellness Reframed: Innovative Initiatives to Improve the Wellbeing ofResidents and Medical Students
Resident and medical student wellness continues to be an important issue as we work to combat rising rates of burnout. Over the past few years, progress has been made as creative, innovative initiatives have been implemented to improve wellbeing. Join us for a live webinar to hear from three thought leaders who have greatly influenced advancements in resident and medical student wellness.
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Arlene Sujin Chung, MD, MACM
Program Director
Maimonides Medical Center
Dr. Chung is the Program Director for the Maimonides Medical Center Emergency Medicine Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY. She is also the Immediate Past Chair of the ACEP Well-Being Committee and serves on the New York ACEP Board of Directors. As a nationally-recognized speaker and educator, Dr. Chung has made advocating for physician wellness a central focus of her career though lectures, teaching, policy development, and creating sustainable solutions for the future. -
Al’ai Alvarez, MD, FACEP, FAAEM
Director of Well-Being, Co-Lead, Human Potential Team, Fellowship Director, Stanford Emergency Medicine Wellness Fellowship
Stanford Emergency Medicine
Dr. Al'ai Alvarez MD, FACEP, FAAEM is a clinical assistant professor of Emergency Medicine (EM) and the Director of Well-Being at Stanford Emergency Medicine. He co-leads the Human Potential Team and serves as the Fellowship Director of the Stanford EM Physician Wellness. He co-chairs the Stanford WellMD Physician Wellness Forum. His work focuses on humanizing physician roles as individuals and teams through the harnessing of our individual human potential in the context of high-performance teams. This includes optimizing the interdependence between Process Improvement (Quality and Clinical Operations), Recruitment (Diversity), and Well-being (Inclusion). -
Steven B. Bird, MD
Vice Chair for Education and Residency Director for the Department of Emergency Medicine; Past President, SAEM
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Dr. Steve Bird grew up in Illinois and obtained his degree in biology with honors from Yale University in 1991. While at Yale he conducted research for 3 years with Prof Sidney Altman, Dean of Yale University and winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He then graduated AOA from Northwestern University Medical School under a Navy health professions scholarship program.
Initially interested in neurosurgery, Dr. Bird spent 2 years as a surgery resident at Naval Medical Center San Diego. His surgery training was then interrupted as he was selected for Naval Flight Surgeon training. After spending 6 months in Pensacola at flight school, he was deployed to Okinawa, Japan (along with his wife, AnneMarie, a Navy officer) for two years, serving as a flight surgeon with the United States Marine Corps.
Dr. Bird then elected to resign from the Navy (and from neurosurgery) and pursue emergency medicine residency at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he served as chief resident followed by a fellowship in medical toxicology, also at UMass. He has remained as faculty at Umass since 2004 and was residency program director from 2011-2019.
Dr. Bird is currently the Chief Experience Officer (CXO), for UMassMemorial Healthcare and the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In that role he is responsible for all physician engagement and wellness activities across the 5-hospital system.
Dr. Bird served as President of SAEM from 2018-2019. -
Jeffrey Sakamoto, MD
Chief Resident, Stanford-Kaiser, Emergency Medicine Residency Program; RAMS Board Secretary-Treasurer; SAEM Wellness Committee Member
Dr. Jeffrey T. Sakamoto is a Chief Resident at Stanford Emergency Medicine Residency and a member of the SAEM Wellness Committee. He also serves as the RAMS Board Secretary-Treasurer.