Resident Wellness

Resident Wellness Committee

Due to increasing burnout among physicians nationwide, Stanford created a Resident Wellness Committee. We recognize caring and compassion as core values of healthcare providers, and therefore physician wellness is a key aim of our program. The Stanford Internal Medicine Residency Wellness Committee aims to collaborate and coordinate the promotion and insurance of the total well-being of the Stanford residents, focusing its efforts on a holistic approach to wellness, including the optimization of physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, and social vitality.  Current efforts of the committee include yearly resident retreats, once monthly wellness noon conferences, small group debrief sessions, weekly resident shout outs, easy access to a wide variety of mental health resources, resident happy hours, and other wellness-related activities and events throughout the year.

The Kindness Coalition

The Kindness Coalition (TKC) is a group dedicated to promoting kindness within the hospital. TKC does this by encouraging and identifying acts of kindness carried out between healthcare workers. As a whole, TKC aims to foster kindness and collaboration among interdepartmental and interprofessional healthcare staff, improve healthcare worker wellbeing through facilitating a supportive working environment, and improve patient care by promoting collaboration.

Wellness Photo Gallery

Alumni Spotlight

Alex Zubenko

Alex Zubenko was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. She received a B.A. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from UCSD in 2013. She then enrolled at UIC for medical school, earning her M.D. in 2018. As a resident at Stanford, Alex’s interests include physician wellness, Med-Ed, and quality improvement. She served as the wellness committee leader, representative for the Committee on Residency Reform (CRR), and co-leader of the Stanford Hospitalist Advanced Practice and Education (SHAPE) program. She is currently an Academic Hospitalist at Northwestern University. Her favorite outside-of-hospital hobbies include hiking, traveling, cooking, live music, and strength training.

Residency Training with a Side of Wellness

It’s a crisp, bright Sunday morning in Palo Alto, and over a dozen residents have congregated at the entrance to the Dish, a satellite structure reached by a popular 3.9-mile hiking trail that winds through the foothills behind Stanford’s campus.