Redesigning Residency for Connection and Resilience

Editor’s Note: For more on the topic of social connection and burnout, please see this Academic Medicine article. For even more on burnout, be sure to check out this collection. Meaningful connections matter. Meaningful connections are those relationships that nourish us, that make us feel the opposite of anonymous—from a patient’s smile, to a shared laugh with a co-resident, to an attending’s pat on the back. On a day-to-day level, these connections with the people around us sustain us, make us resilient, and prevent burnout. Having recently completed internal medicine residency, I can attest that medical training is not optimized for connection. Meaningful connections require recurrent interactions over time, i.e. continuity. But continuity can be hard to find on the wards. For example, on a typical four-week rotation during residency, I’d work with two pairs of interns and up to three different attendings. That’s a lot of turnover for a would-be team. I often found myself receiving feedback based on the briefest of interactions, from well-meaning attendings whom I never worked with again. So, how can we optimize medical training for meaningful connections? One experience from residency stands out. At the end of my second year, I was scheduled for back-to-back blocks of inpatient medicine. Instead of doing a typical four-week block, I stayed on the same team, at the same hospital, for nine weeks straight. Over the course of those nine weeks, I worked with two pa...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Trainee Perspective burnout medical education medical student wellness residency residents Source Type: blogs