A message from the Chief Wellness Officer

"Leadership is a partnership, not a hierarchy.” That is one of my tenets as the Chief Wellness Officer for the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. As the FoMD Chief Wellness Officer, I am tasked with supporting health promoting learning and work environments for everyone in our community. These environments include our undergraduate, postgraduate and graduate learners, our administrators and managers, and our clinical and academic faculty members. The ultimate goal of the FoMD Well team is to imbue a wellbeing lens across the academy, to all of our policies, practices, structures, resources, leadership and faculty development opportunities.  

“Instead of praising people for being resilient, change the systems that are making them vulnerable.”

Systems level issues provide a significant barrier to our professional fulfillment and our personal wellbeing. There is both an ethical and business responsibility to decrease our administrative burdens and fully harness our unique skills, talents in a supportive and creative workplace. As we foster approaches to tackle the inefficiencies and hazards in our work and learning environments there will be advancements to wellbeing, science, and patient care. Thriving environments are synonymous with ensuring inclusive spaces with a solid foundation of psychological safety. Ultimately, we need to identify and intervene with the obstacles that diminish the meaning in our work, and recapture the energy and passion for the ambitious and challenging tasks that we confront.

Dr. Melanie Lewis
Chief Wellness Officer; Professor and Associate Dean LAW, Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry