Building A Co-Curricular Wellness Program for Medical Students at a Canadian Medical School

The increasing number of medical students who present with mental illness and burnout is becoming a very real challenge among medical schools nationally and globally, prompting a need for medical schools to address this very real problem. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) seeks to help solve this problem by means of a co-curricular wellness program aimed at preventing mental illness and burnout from happening. Rather than being reactive as students self-identify as having a mental illness, this OIP argues for preventative measures that help to prevent mental illness and burnout from occurring at all. Using a three-pronged leadership approach of authentic, distributed and servant, improvement in the area of mental illness and burnout is an institution-wide problem to solve, one that requires the input of everyone: senior leadership, administration, faculty, staff and students. In particular, faculty will be key in the design and implementation of a co-curricular wellness program, as it has been shown that the learning environment directly affects the mental health of students (Daskivish et al., 2014). It is hoped that the change plan which employs a collaborative approach, along with a shared vision and purpose, will help to decrease the number of medical students who present with mental illnesses