Better Together Physician Coaching: An Innovative Solution to Medical Trainee Burnout

Detailed Summary

Burnout refers to feelings of exhaustion, negativism, and reduced personal efficacy resulting from chronic workplace stress. In healthcare, burnout leads to increased medical errors, poorer patient care and negatively affects professional development and retention. Burnout is a growing problem that begins early in medical training. Women and those underrepresented in medicine (URM) experience a disproportionate amount of burnout likely due to the cognitive load required to manage microaggressions, stereotypes, and harmful socially adopted narratives around efficacy. Professional coaching is a metacognition tool with a sustainable positive effect on physician well-being but typically relies on expensive consultants or time-consuming faculty development, often making it infeasible for medical training programs to offer. To overcome this barrier, the investigators created Better Together Physician Coaching (BT) a 6-month coaching program for women residents at the University of Colorado (CU). BT includes regular online group-coaching, written coaching, and weekly self-study modules delivered by physician life coaches (Co-PIs). A pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 101 BT participants demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in burnout, self-compassion, and imposter syndrome in the intervention group. BT will be scaled up to a national level and evaluated with an RCT mirroring our pilot in 10+ graduate medical education (GME) programs for 1000+ participants coordinated and evaluated by our CU team. To accomplish this goal, the investigators set the following major objectives for this project: * Prepare to expand the BT program by teaming with a cohort of diverse physician coaches. * Implement BT in 10+ GME programs to serve 1000+ trainee participants with deliberate inclusion of institutions with diverse GME trainee populations serving geographically rural and/or medically underserved areas. * Assess our outcomes: primary: reduce burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Index (goal: 10% relative improvement), and secondary: self-compassion, imposter syndrome and moral injury. Outcome generalizability and program feasibility at a national level will also be analyzed, as will participant experience to gain a richer understanding of how BT may help trainees, in particular those URM. * Advance the field of coaching in GME through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to GME trainee wellbeing.

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