Peggy Plews-Ogan

Peggy Plews-Ogan is Bernard B. and Annie E. Brodie Professor of Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the Co-Director of the Wisdom and Wellbeing program—a health-system initiative to address stress, burnout and professionalism at UVA, which includes a coaching program for faculty and staff. She and her husband Jim, a pediatrician and Emeritus Associate Professor at UVA, have been together for 44 years. Jim was diagnosed with ALS in 2021 and after Jim’s diagnosis, they have devoted their lives to advocacy work toward ALS. For 10 years, Peggy led UVA’s primary care, geriatrics, palliative medicine, and hospital medicine divisions. Her therapeutic practice has concentrated on vulnerable groups, starting with migrant farmworkers. She has studied patient safety and quality of care to help physicians operate compassionately and creatively. She founded UVA’s Institute for Appreciative Practice to improve healthcare organizations. Her study focused on patient safety and error prevention. This led to study on learning from failures and the arena of wisdom—how wisdom is obtained from unpleasant experience and post-traumatic growth. She has several teaching and medical humanism honors and has written many articles and book chapters, as well as three books: Appreciative Practices in Health Care, Choosing Wisdom: Strategies and Inspiration for Growing through Life-Changing Difficulties (with a public television documentary), and Wisdom Leadership: Leading Positive Change in the Academic Health Sciences Center. Dr. Plews-Ogan completed her internal medicine residency at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital after graduating from Harvard Medical School.