Performance and Wellbeing: Partners in Sustaining Excellence for Learners and Educators

Date: Friday, 25 September 2026 | Time: 1445 - 1615 | Venue: L1-S1, Academia (SGH Campus)

Track Type: Symposium

Speaker(s):

Overview:

Wellbeing in health professions education has received increasing attention as burnout among healthcare learners and educators continues to rise. At the same time, educational environments often emphasise performance and productivity, creating a perceived tension between excellence and wellbeing. When learning environments support motivation, reflection, and psychological safety, learners demonstrate greater engagement, resilience, and sustained performance. Bringing wellbeing into the learning environment can also positively influence educators by fostering more constructive interactions and a more positive learning climate that supports deeper engagement.

Despite widespread recognition of the importance of wellbeing, educators frequently report a practical challenge: they value wellbeing but feel they lack time or strategies to integrate it into already demanding teaching environments.

This symposium focusses on small, practical practices that can be embedded within everyday teaching interactions, rather than additional programmes or standalone interventions.

Speakers will share narratives from their experiences in health professions education, illustrating how they balance expectations of performance while supporting wellbeing for both learners and themselves.

Participants will engage in short reflective exercises that introduce practical approaches such as values reflection, strengths-based conversations, coaching questions, mindfulness pauses, self-compassion practices, and strategies to foster psychologically safe learning environments. Participants will also explore how brief learner feedback can help educators adapt these practices to learner needs and preferences.

By combining lived experience, educational frameworks, and interactive reflection, this symposium aims to equip educators with practical strategies to cultivate learning environments where wellbeing is not an additional task, but a driver of sustainable performance and educational excellence.

Learning Outcome(s):

By the end of the symposium, participants will be able to:

1. Describe evidence linking wellbeing and performance in HPE.
2. Reflect on strategies integrating wellbeing into teaching.
3. Apply practical practices to support learner and educator wellbeing.

Target Audience:

This symposium is designed for educators across the health professions and health sciences. It will be relevant to clinical educators, faculty members, supervisors, programme leaders, and educational developers interested in cultivating learning environments that support both performance and wellbeing.

No prerequisite knowledge or prior training is required. The session is designed to be accessible to participants from diverse professional backgrounds and career stages.

Participants will reflect on their own teaching experiences while exploring practical strategies that can be incorporated into everyday educational interactions. The symposium emphasises approaches that benefit both learners and educators, recognising that sustainable educational environments require attention to the wellbeing of those who teach as well as those who learn.