This story is one of more than 20 health system profiles featured in the 2025 AMA Joy in Medicine® magazine (log into your AMA account to view).
Bayhealth—a nonprofit health system with more than 4,000 employees and 400 physicians in Central and Southern Delaware—has been on a well-being journey with a strong commitment to reducing doctor burnout for a decade now and their efforts are contributing to a more satisfied, less stressed physician workforce.
The well-being drive started in 2015 with a committee exploring what Bayhealth could do surrounding the issue. It expanded to a chief wellness officer (CWO) being named about five years ago and executives incorporating well-being into the organization’s strategic plan.
About a year and a half ago, Bayhealth expanded its efforts to create an interprofessional wellness council that has full support from the organization’s executives for the projects and initiatives the council believes will benefit physician and other health professionals’ well-being.
“The collaboration of the groups is the essential part to foster the commitment to well-being. Even if you have leadership support, which we do, you still need to work with people and collaborate,” says Thomas E. Vaughan, MD, a radiologist and CWO for Bayhealth. “A lot of it comes down to relationships. When you have good relationships, you collaborate and trust each other.”
Those relationships and collaborations among different health professionals at Bayhealth—physicians, nurses and others—allow the organization to help foster better support for physicians and others who are stressed and experiencing burnout symptoms.
It is common for physicians to feel overwhelmed from time to time. That is why Bayhealth emphasizes the importance of well-being with appropriate treatment and support for all health conditions and encourages physicians to seek help when needed.
Two big ways Bayhealth has supported physicians most recently: Changing the credentialing application questions to help break down systemic barriers that may prevent a physician from seeking mental health care and implementing the Resilience in Stressful Events (RISE) Peer Support Program, a multidisciplinary team that serves as an emotional peer support structure for physicians or others who were emotionally impacted by a stressful patient-related event or unanticipated adverse event.
Destigmatizing required forms
To improve physicians’ mental well-being, it’s important that they are comfortable seeking the behavioral health care they need. That’s something that has traditionally been stigmatized in health care, including on the questions physicians must answer for credentialing, licensing and professional liability insurance.
Changes like these are an important step because an American Hospital Association report lists stigma associated with talking about and seeking behavioral health care—including fear of losing hospital privileges via the credentialing process—as a key driver of suicide in the health care workforce.
Other research has found that physicians working in a state where the initial licensing application or the renewal application probes overly broadly about mental health history were 20% likelier to be reluctant about seeking help. Overall, about 40% of physicians reported reluctance to seeking formal medical care for treatment of a mental health condition.