The Wellbeing Thermometer: A Novel Framework for Measuring Wellbeing

Abstract

Background: In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to acknowledge the effect the working environment has on health professionals in the UK. Several institutions have produced reports either commenting on the current status of the situation or pointing to a future direction. Still, practically it is unclear how much difference these intentions have made to the lives of health professionals. Method: One of the main obstacles in advancing this agenda is that without knowing what well-being is and how to measure it, a person cannot modify it. A multidisciplinary team of experts set as a task to develop a new theoretical framework of well-being accompanied by a tool to measure it hence affording the individual better knowledge and more control of their state of wellbeing. The development of this framework took three steps: understanding the concept of wellbeing from existing literature by reviewing all available tools to identify gaps and weaknesses, constructing a new framework for wellbeing and devising a set of questions to measure it. Results: The result of this work was a framework suggesting that wellbeing is determined by the domains of health, thoughts emotions, spiritual and social along with 25 questions (five for each domain) the answers to which are given an indication of a person’s wellbeing status. Conclusion: The current models of wellbeing are limited. They are grounded either on concepts of mental illness such as major depressive disorder or single functions such as psychological or social. We propose that a new framework for wellbeing is required which is more holistic to enable professionals to develop “Wellbeing Intelligence”.