Background: Almost half of trainees experience burnout during their career. Despite the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) recommendation that training programs enact well-being curricula, there is no proven method of addressing this difficult topic.
Methods: We created a curriculum addressing physician resiliency and well-being, designed for an Internal Medicine Residency Program. This curriculum utilized episodes from a medical television series, Scrubs, to facilitate a monthly, 1-h faculty guided discussion group. We collected informal feedback and abbreviated Maslach Burnout Inventories (aMBI) monthly and conducted a formal focus group after 6 months to gauge its effectiveness.
Results: The curriculum was successfully conducted for 12 months with each session averaging 18-20 residents. Residents reported high satisfaction, stating it was more enjoyable and helpful than traditional resiliency training. 19 of 24 residents (79 %) completed a baseline aMBI, and 17 of 20 residents (85 %) who attended the most recent session completed the 6-month follow-up, showing a non-significant 1-point improvement in all subsets of the aMBI.
Conclusions: This novel, low-cost, easily implemented curriculum addressed resiliency and burn-out in an Internal Medicine Residency. It was extremely well received and can easily be expanded to other training programs or to providers outside of training.
Keywords: Burnout; Curriculum; GME; Media in education; Physician wellbeing.
© 2021. The Author(s).