MUSC innovator helps develop leadership, wellness

If health care workers don’t feel healthy, who will take care of the rest of us?

The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for practitioner wellness, which includes avoiding burnout and feeling enabled as leaders to impact decisions about public policy and organizational governance.

Scott Bragg is on it. The associate professor of clinical pharmacy and outcome sciences at the MUSC College of Pharmacy was recognized with the December 2020 “I am an MUSC innovator” award for his work in this area, which predates COVID-19 by some four years. 

“I enjoy doing this project,” he said. “We want our healthcare practitioners to feel better able to advocate, to empathize with patients, and to guard against burnout.” 

Partnering with MUSC College of Medicine family medicine physicians Sean Haley and Russell Blackwelder, Bragg has been working with medical students, pharmacy students, and family medicine residents to assess their sense of leadership and advocacy. 

The team measures those characteristics using a sociopolitical control scale as a tool. Medical residents take a survey to establish a baseline at the beginning of residency and then again when they complete their training.

“We gauge how much empowerment they feel around leadership and advocacy and also ask questions associated with wellness and burnout,” Bragg said. 

Students and residents alike participate regularly in discussions related to leadership, advocacy, and wellness. The team posts questions the night before rounds and then the group has a 20-minute discussion afterwards. Questions can include areas like ethics, population health, the pandemic, public policy, and issues about diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

“For instance, today we’re talking about a couple of pharmacies in California that are closing,” Bragg said. “The state passed an ordinance that grocery store workers should be higher paid because of the pandemic. In response, the chain said those stores were underperforming and had to be closed. How do we respond to this? How do we advocate for essential workers? How would we work collaboratively with industry, health care, and state government to create solutions?”

Other topics in recent discussions have included:

• How would you roll out the COVID-19 vaccine if you were czar of it for South Carolina?
• How should we react to the riots in the capitol?
• What book or movie is today’s United States like?

That last question brought answers like “Lord of the Flies,” “Idiocracy,” and “Contagion.” Bragg’s own answer was “V for Vendetta,” which fittingly includes social unrest and a pandemic. 

Whether the rest of us end up picking Thomas More’s “Utopia” or Stephen King’s “The Stand” may depend on how these students and residents feel about their own roles as leaders and health care providers. 

“We want them to feel empowered in talking to legislators, powers that be in the health-system, and to make suggestions about changes we can make in our own institution,” he said.