Resilience and Wellness in Medical Training: A Master of Public Health Practicum Report

Abstract

The wellness and resilience of the medical trainee (medical students and resident physicians) should be prioritized, because of the association between training, burnout and depressive symptoms. To address this problem, a group of medical trainees, along with the Benson Henry Institute of Mind-Body Medicine, adapted a Resiliency Curriculum for resident physicians. To help address physician burnout on a wider scale, this curriculum can be disseminated widely, to benefit any residency program that understands the need to address the mental well-being of their trainees. I helped to draft an Implementation Toolkit document for the curriculum to facilitate this dissemination. In addition to the project with the Benson Henry Institute, I was given the opportunity to address wellness at the medical student level at Harvard Medical School (HMS). The movement to begin the current HMS Wellness and Mental Health Initiative had begun in 2016, and it was important for the perspectives of the students to be elicited, as they are the key stakeholders of the initiative. In order to collect those perspectives, I created a design for student focus groups. These projects, and the original version of this report, were completed as a requirement for my Masters in Public Health (MPH) Practicum requirement in 2016, but the work for these projects continues today.