As health systems emerge from the pandemic, academic medical centres are motivated to have a healthy and resilient workforce. In the face of the collective traumas of the pandemic, we took a systems approach to infuse wellness into our culture by modelling collective recovery in a non-traditional town hall. Over a dozen senior leaders, faculty, staff, and students shared their personal experiences in a virtual forum, nearly 1000 attendees communally supported one another. Since the town hall, a recording of the experience has been broadly viewed, messaging from leaders proliferated, and smaller versions of the same exercise were implemented. At a time when academic medical centres faced multiple challenges, we chose to first value the well-being of our staff at a system-wide level. It is our hope that other academic medical centres leverage our story to hold space for the experiences of the people who make their work possible.
Keywords: COVID-19; professional well-being; trauma-informed.
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