Conemaugh Memorial - Emergency Medicine Residency - A Culture Celebration 2024 - 03.07.24

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Conemaugh Emergency Medicine Residency & POMA Wellness Committee

1. What was the general understanding of the purpose ofthe project/program by participants?
The event was an absolute success! After reviewing our outcome questionnaire completed by our EM Residents, the overall census and purpose of our cultural celebration was to: learn more about our coworkers and bring us all closer together, to appreciate a deeper understanding of our friends and colleagues, to learn about each other's backgrounds, to learn about all the different foods connected to our program, to remind ourselves that teamwork is important, to learn about the diversity of our co-residents, to learn how different, yet similar we all are, to foster our diversity and inclusion, to build trustable relationships, to bond over our favorite food, to experience the overall support given by our colleagues when we are asked to share about ourselves.

2. Why did you choose the specific wellness project/activity?
Our wellness day was created to dedicate a day to taking care of ourselves, with a planned series of activities aimed at promoting wellness and building comradery among our residency family. Our cultural potluck encouraged our residents and attendings to bring in their favorite dish that would represent each other's culture. What our residents and attendings enjoyed most were: getting to play team sports and build priceless relationships, participating in great and hilarious activities with 10/10 humans, celebrating each other, hearing about what is important to our fellow colleagues, enjoying our fellow comrade's delightful home cooked meals, playing games with our extended family, making invaluable memories, bringing us closer together in the workplace.

3. During the project/program, what tangible tools or strategies were demonstrated or taught to address wellness and life balance?
We hosted team-building games to unwind and promote healthy competition amongst our residents and attendings. This is what our residents commented about our activities: exercising and these unique team-building games was an epic experience, spending time with our favorite people was a fantastic decision, making time for self-care and time for our friends was desperately needed, the fun exercising activities was a great way to remind us how to balance life and wellness, learning different exercise strategies really helps enjoy our free time, playing games is a must in any residency, work hard so you can play hard, roar and count to four, let go and laugh, try to look at the lighter side of things and not to be so serious, our time together is limited, so absorb, be kind and soak in growing with each other.

4. What do you intend to do, upon returning to work, that you learned and practiced during the activity, that will improve your response to stressful situations?
After our cultural celebration wellness day, many of our residents and attending's indicated how grateful they were. This is what our crew learned: we learned that talking to our fellow residents is helpful, as they have a variety of experiences, we can all benefit from, we learned about unique food and ethnic backgrounds we never knew our residency related to. We learned how to build meaningful teams within our program. We learned that there are a lot of athletic residents in our program. We learned that incorporating exercise to our daily schedule is rejuvenating. We learned that we have a large variety of cultures in our residency program and should be more open to different perspectives. We learned that healthy competition pushes people. We learned that we need to find healthy outlets to navigate frustration. We were reminded how cooking home food is therapeutic, and spectacular.
Food and exercise are the glue to meaningful relationships!

5. What can POMA do to address wellness and life balance for your future?
The space and opportunity that POMA created for us is undoubtably intangible. Our cultural celebration was a blessing to our program. The day created memories and stories that will never be forgotten. These days and activities are the events that we all hold on to as we are constantly challenged by the rigorous demands that come with our residency journey. Having the support from

POMA each year, I believe, is beneficial to the success of our program, or any program that can create a safe space to unwind and re-connect. This is what our residents would like to say to the POMA Wellness Committee: thank you for getting involved, building team relationships is crucial in a program's success and growth. We appreciate POMA in helping us establishing a strong residency.
Mindfulness is often overlooked, POMA reminded us why mindfulness is so important. POMA gave us the opportunity to spend time together and understand each other's culture. We are so thankful to have an organization like POMA actively involved in our wellness. We hope to have a longevity relationship with the POMA Wellness Committee to continue spreading joy and wellness to our beloved program. Our wellness translates to better patient care and we grateful for POMA helping us support these events that essentially make us better as a whole.