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Dear fellow medical students,  Please don’t read this – not all at once – but if you read nothing else, give me a minute to explain why this is useful for you. As medical students, we are inundated with demands from many facets of our lives. We play a strenuous balancing act day in and day out, trying to fit multiple demands from school, family, friends, extracurricular pursuits and recreational activities into a 24-hour time frame. Yet, so many of us find that we don’t get to finish what we set out to do, and with stress accumulating day after day, many of us feel overwhelmed. Being a medical student, it seems, can be harmful to your health. Imagine though, if the opposite was true: imagine being able to actually wake up feeling vibrant and strong, mentally focused, emotionally centred, and ready to tackle the challenges life throws at you. That’s exactly what the CFMS Wellness Program hopes to do for you. Embracing wellness: healthy medical students for a healthy healthcare system is an important CFMS initiative that will form the basis of a new wellness culture among medical students. This website is an integral part of the CFMS Wellness Program. But it’s about so much more than the webpages before you. Whether you’re a first-year or forth-year medical student, you’ve entered not just a new year, but a new era in medical student wellness. Just check out what’s in store for you here. While we have had wellness days or weeks and dedicated student affairs offices at each school, medical student well being has only come to the forefront with passing importance, all too often taking a backseat to the stresses of upcoming deadlines. This is going to change. You’re changing that. With your help, we plan to fundamentally change how medical students approach wellness – both their own and that of their patients. We aim to establish a wellness mindset among medical students by providing you with wellness tools designed and customized to your needs. Themes and topics relating to student wellness such as stress, sleep, exercise, nutrition, financial, spiritual, mental and emotional fitness will all be addressed. We’re going to start by offering you regularly updated information, resources, and opportunities for engagement to help you relieve stress, find balance, and work towards a sense of total wellness within your own life. We are providing you with a free membership and account on the brand new CFMS Wellness Portal at www.medstudentwellness.ca, where you can sign up using the same code as on the CFMS website. In partnership with the CMA Centre for Physician Wellbeing, the most relevant information for physician wellness will also be accessible through this site as well. It gets better, though. We’ve partnered with a major Canadian wellness publisher, Wellness Options, to create a quarterly publication specially for you called “MedStudentWellness” and to provide additional wellness content to our website. This will allow us to help you and other medical students across the country keep up to date on the most relevant wellness information. Regarding our inaugural package, we’ve organized it for you around 7 high-yield wellness components that are most important to medical students. We’ve included fully referenced articles on each topic and have special, themed issues that we’ll send you throughout the year, with our first issue focusing on medical student stress. These resources, including this website, are not meant to be consumed all at once. Instead, think of them as a menu of wellness items; pick and choose what you find helpful now, and then put aside a little bit of time to revisit the information frequently. You know that there will be times later on when you’re going to be stressed out, so why not invest a few minutes now to prepare yourself by using the resources on this website and in your magazine? Bookmark a web article right now that you’ll follow up on and put it at the top of your screen, or put the magazine next to your pillow, or in the bathroom, or slip it into your exercise shoes... be creative! Take a few seconds to comment on an article on the website, to start reading an article, or to talk to a friend about it. Whatever you do, make the time now. You’ve already achieved so much, and you’re well on your way to achieving so much more. Along the way, you’ll thank yourself the next time a potentially stressful event hits, and you find yourself handling it with ease. I truly hope you find this helpful, and I can’t wait to hear more of your success stories! All the best,
Ali Okhowat,
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