An anonymous donor has handed Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine $20 million to build a new program aimed at keeping medical students, resident physicians and early-career nurses from burning out before their careers even get rolling. The school announced the gift on Wednesday, earmarking it to launch what it's calling the Healthcare Professionals' Wellbeing Academy.
The academy will launch with a focus on medical students, resident physicians and early-career nurses, according to ROI-NJ. Programming is expected to roll out over six years and will eventually provide ongoing education, coaching, peer support and practical skill-building for the clinicians it serves, the outlet reports.
The gift is being counted toward Hackensack Meridian Health Foundation's $1 billion Be The Difference campaign, which the foundation says it's working to complete. That campaign is organized around four pillars — patient care, research and discovery, access to care, and medical education and nursing support — and the new wellbeing program is described as directly advancing that fourth pillar.
A Leadership Pitch Built on Self-Care for Caregivers
Hackensack Meridian Health CEO Robert C. Garrett framed the gift as a way to turn the health system's attention inward. “ensure our physicians are caring for themselves just as well as they are caring for our community,” Garrett said, per the same ROI-NJ account.
Dr. Jeffrey Boscamp, president and dean of the School of Medicine, echoed that framing in more personal terms. “This $20 million gift allows us to prioritize the mental and emotional health of our medical professionals,” Boscamp said.
Measuring Whether It Actually Works
Hackensack Meridian Health says it plans to evaluate outcomes, expand programming across its network, and share findings, curricula and best practices with other institutions, the ROI-NJ report notes. Success will reportedly be judged through a wide set of measures — participation and engagement, burnout and wellbeing indicators, retention, leadership development, interdisciplinary collaboration and scholarly output.
The school's strategic plan also discusses wellbeing, according to the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine strategic plan. The school's Office of Student Affairs and Wellbeing describes its existing approach as a holistic, integrated and strategic approach to wellbeing from the individual student to the institutional structures, per Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine's Office of Student Affairs and Wellbeing.
Part of a Bigger Giving Pattern
This isn't Hackensack Meridian's first headline-grabbing gift this year. In September, the health system announced a separate $125 million anonymous gift that it described as the largest philanthropic commitment in the network's history and the largest gift of its kind in New Jersey healthcare, according to a release distributed via PR Newswire.
The medical school has also drawn large individual gifts before. Philanthropist Helena Theurer gave a record-breaking $10 million donation that created four annual $100,000 scholarships, according to NJBiz. Separately, Carin and Roger Ehrenberg gave a $3 million leadership gift to support the school's Human Dimension program, building on $1 million in seed capital they contributed in 2022, as reported by New Jersey Business Magazine.
Why Clinician Burnout Is a National Concern
The push to fund wellbeing infrastructure for young clinicians comes amid broader national attention to burnout across health professions. The National Academy of Medicine's Clinician Well-Being Collaborative has convened health professional organizations and health systems since 2017, and it published a National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being in October 2022 calling on multisectoral leaders to drive systemic change, according to the National Academy of Medicine.
Research into effective fixes remains thin. An article in PubMed Central notes there are few rigorous studies examining burnout prevention specifically among medical students and residents, and that prior interventions centered on mindfulness techniques and flexible workload scheduling have yielded limited success, though combined fitness, philanthropy and community-building approaches may prove more effective. Another PubMed Central article focused on academic medical centers argues that significant burnout among clinical and research faculty has resulted in career disengagement and turnover, making faculty wellbeing initiatives a institutional priority.
Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, located on the ON3 campus in Nutley and Clifton, was the first private medical school to open in New Jersey in more than 50 years when it welcomed its first class of students in 2018. Hackensack Meridian Health assumed independent operation of the school in July 2020, and the school achieved full accreditation in February 2023.
