Across healthcare systems, leaders are increasingly treating clinician well-being as an operational priority rather than a bridge to be crossed reactively, particularly in high-stress areas such as psychiatry, residency training and hospital violence prevention.
A May cross-sectional study published in the National Library of Medicine analyzed 370,778 residents and fellows who participated in Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-accredited training programs between 2015 and 2021. Of those, 161 died during training, with 47 — about 29% — dying from suicide. The highest number of resident suicides occurred during the first quarter of their first year.
These findings are prompting some health systems to intervene earlier in the training pipeline.
At Columbus-based OhioHealth, efforts to preserve the well-being of its more than 400 residents begin before they even step into the hospital. The system’s health and wellness coach connects with each resident in the months before training begins to build relationships and walk through available resources.
“It’s understanding what’s available to you before you’re swimming in it and you can’t even think straight,” Laurie Hommema, MD, OhioHealth’s senior medical director of well-being, told Becker’s. “The first three months of residency are so intense in terms of learning and work hours.”
During those early conversations, residents can air concerns, such as test-taking anxiety or connecting with a family physician, helping ensure support is in place before the stress of training takes hold.
“We tried to think differently about how we can create an environment and experience for our residents so that we don’t have the same risk and cause of death that we’ve seen in our country,” Dr. Hommema said. “To that point, a lot of industries wouldn’t stand for that type of outcome.”
The wellness coach reconnects with residents to offer additional support during the three- to six-month window — when suicide risk is highest — with a majority opting to meet again.
Leaders at New York City-based NYC Health + Hospitals are also building in structured approaches to safeguard clinician well-being.
One such initiative is Helping Healers Heal, a peer-support staff wellness program designed to connect colleagues who understand the demands of behavioral healthcare to supply an open forum for sharing experiences and processing challenges.
“The idea behind it is to focus on well-being in a proactive way — to take it out of behavioral health and look at well-being as a general thing, not necessarily to medicalize it and to make it about behavioral health or about disorder, but to make it common,” Omar Fattal, MD, system chief of behavioral health, told Becker’s.
Violence-reduction efforts are integral to that strategy, Dr. Fattal said. The system incorporates proactive debriefing, staff training and empowerment of front-line clinicians to participate in violence-prevention efforts to improve satisfaction and stability across the system’s behavioral health units.
In the service of the same goal, leaders at t WakeMed in Raleigh, N.C., are leveraging flexible scheduling, including in the form of a seven-days-on, seven-days-off model.
“It’s really important to have work-life balance. And if we’re not happy at home, then that comes into the work, and you can’t give your patients your best,” Micah Krempasky, MD, chief medical officer of mental health, said.
Hospitals running on the traditional Monday-through-Friday model often need weekend coverage staff members who primarily maintain operations rather than advance care, which can slow discharges and throughput. That part-time weekend staffing can also add cost pressures related to benefits and recruitment.
Under the seven-on, seven-off model, WakeMed eliminates the need for separate weekend staffing and, by extension, those burdens. Patient care quality improves too: When teams are paired and given autonomy to manage schedules, handoffs are reduced — a key risk point in care transitions.
“I only have one handoff every seven days; my throughput looks better. We discharge seven days a week 100% and you get consistency on the unit, which I think reduces your seclusion and restraint,” Dr. Krempasky said. “My providers are happy.”
Newport, Va.-based Riverside Regional Medical Center strengthened its workplace violence response to address clinician safety. After identifying gaps, the system launched a behavioral response team, which increased reporting by 245% from 2024 to 2025 and enabled faster intervention in escalating situations.
The team supports front-line staff across the hospital outside of the emergency department. Between June and the end of February, Riverside reviewed 430 workplace violence and near-miss incidents and took action in 337 cases.
“We really took a deep dive looking at our workplace violence prevention program and what we could do to kind of do better,” Mary Haigh, MSN, RN, senior director of emergency services, said. “We definitely had underreporting of events, and we were noticing some trends in events that were occurring.”
She said reporting increased due to three key changes: fostering a just culture; not creating more workload for nursing staff; and capturing actions taken to prove reports are being addressed.
“We switched the reporting from being a nursing task,” Ms. Haigh said. “Now our security does 100% of reporting, and there’s no nursing burden to report events.”
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