Residency Director Tapped For National Wellness Task Force

Nguyet-Cam Vu Lam, M.D, FAAFP, Program Director, Bethlehem Family Medicine Residency at St. Luke’s University Health Network has been selected to serve on the Association of Family Medicine Residency Directors (AFMRD) new Program Director (PD) Wellness Task Force.

The task force was formed because AFMRD members and their colleagues have experienced significant stress related to administering their residency programs, ensuring continued care delivery to the communities they serve, recruiting, on-boarding, and training residents since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Many residency programs continue to struggle with patient volumes, virtual interviewing, assessing resident readiness, and workforce disruptions and shortages.

The Program Director Wellness Task Force is charged with exploring options for providing wellness support to AFMRD members as well as their team members and to recommend wellness initiatives to the AFMRD’s Board of Directors.

The six program directors who are members of the group will hold their first meeting virtually in early October. Dr. Lam said she is excited to serve on this task force and contribute to its important work.

Dr. Lam has been passionate about physician wellbeing ever since 2014 when she was asked to lead a residency faculty development session at St. Luke’s about physician burnout.  In that role, she was tasked with developing initiatives to promote physician wellbeing to combat burnout, which she learned from surveys was as high at St. Luke’s as the national average.

The group devised ways to support physician wellbeing and shared them with others in the network.  “We created physician wellbeing curriculum and residency policy on wellbeing before it became a requirement of residency programs,” she said. 

Having been Program Director for four years, Dr. Lam said she knows first-hand how challenging the role can be.  She is happy to be a part of the AFMRD task force “to support program directors in their well-being so that they can continue the high calling of training future family physicians.”