A UCLA-led research team has developed a new tool designed to measure the root-cause drivers of healthcare worker well-being. Going beyond traditional assessments of burnout and professional fulfillment, the tool evaluates the systemic factors that influence well-being across the healthcare workforce.
The tool, called the Well-Being Influencers Survey for Healthcare (WISH), was designed by a multi-institutional team of researchers from UCLA, Northwestern University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and University of Illinois, Chicago. WISH evaluates perceptions of workplace factors within healthcare departments that can be improved to enhance worker well-being.
The findings were online ahead of print on February 3 in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology.
“Healthcare worker well-being is in crisis, with serious implications for patient care and organizational stability,” said study lead Dr. Kenneth Elliott Higgins, health sciences assistant clinical professor and director of health and well-being in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at the . “Existing measures tell us how severe the problem is, but not how to fix it. WISH shifts the focus to systemic well-being influencers, offering clear guidance on where to make meaningful changes to foster better-supported, more sustainable careers in healthcare.”
While established tools primarily assess individual states like burnout or fulfillment, WISH shifts the focus to modifiable workplace factors the researchers refer to as “influencers”—such as leadership support, psychological safety, and working conditions—that shape healthcare workers’ well-being. Designed for broad applicability across healthcare, WISH was initially validated within anesthesiology.
For the study, 223 healthcare professionals from UCLA’s Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine completed WISH alongside established well-being measures, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Professional Fulfillment Index. Researchers also explored the relationship between WISH and the institutional impact of healthcare worker well-being, using metrics such as intention to leave academic medicine and levels of engagement.
Among the key findings:
- WISH is a valid and reliable tool for assessing well-being influencers. It demonstrated strong relationships with established well-being metrics and was more highly predictive of measures assessing the impact of well-being, such as intention to leave (ITL)
- WISH can be scored using a single overall score to represent the strength of a well-being culture, while influencer-level scores provide targeted insights that can guide improvement efforts
- Overall, the researchers found that the tool is effective at measuring specific systemic factors that influence healthcare worker well-being that can be targeted for improvement
“Valid and actionable measures of well-being are crucial during this time of troubling levels of dissatisfaction, burnout, and individuals leaving fields they worked so hard to prepare for,” the researchers write. “Recent data from a large ITL dataset shows that anesthesiologists have the highest ITL among all academic faculty. Moreover, anesthesiologists are experiencing significant levels of disillusionment. This body of evidence clearly indicates threats to both healthcare professionals' well-being and institutional stability. As the focus on well-being improvement through systems enhancement evolves, gaining insights into the origins of professional well-being requires assessments designed specifically for this purpose. Such insights can assist in the cultivation of durably supportive cultures aligned with career sustainability.”
Study co-authors are Dr. Theodora Wingert and Jose Hernandez Carcamo of UCLA, Dr. Elizabeth Duggan the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Maxwell Mansolf of Northwestern University, and Dr. Christine Park of the University of Illinois, Chicago.
