Active Resilience Training- The Cure for Physician Burnout?!

ABSTRACT

Background: Physician burnout is recognized as a ubiquitous obstacle. Medical students face difficult transitions throughout their training that increase their risk of burnout. Resiliency training may prepare students to better face the demands of their medical careers. This project is an initial investigation into medical students’ long-term utilization of learned resiliency skills.

Hypothesis: (1) Participation in Active Resilience Training (A.R.T.) will increase student awareness of the importance of resiliency for success in their medical careers. (2) A.R.T. will provide students with long-term usable skills to improve their resiliency. Subsequent utilization of these skills will result in decreased rates of burnout as these trainees progress through residency and their subsequent medical careers.

Methods: Medical students were surveyed 1-18 months after completing Active Resiliency Training (A.R.T.). The computerized survey assessed the program’s success in meeting its stated objectives and how often students used the skills they had learned during the training. 

Results: A.R.T. is highly effective in increasing awareness of the benefits of resiliency training. The majority of participants would recommend the course to their peers. Students continued to utilize the skills learned for more than 18 months after completing the training. These skills included planned breaks, prioritizing sleep, building support systems, and mindfulness techniques.

Conclusions: This work adds to the existing literature regarding participants’ valuation of novel resilience curricula. Students utilize the skills learned in A.R.T. as long as 18 months after completing the program. More study evaluating the specific effects of A.R.T. on traditional measures of resilience such as the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) is needed.

Source of mentor’s funding or other support that funded this research: Funding was provided in part by Wake Forest School of Medicine.