First year residency stress: sources and mediators

This study expands on previous research on stress in the internship year by identifying potential sources of stress in the training requirements and faculty contacts of first year family practice residents. All first year residents completed the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) once a month throughout the year. It was shown that specific training demands, such as the number of beeper calls, the number of nights on call, the amount of sleep, etc., correlated with the POMS and the SDS only in the early rotations. The residents' ratings of commitment to teaching, availability, and sensitivity of the faculty on each service, however, were consistently related to the residents' moods regardless of time of year. When residents rated faculty as low on these characteristics, they scored higher on the stress indicators, whereas when residents rated faculty as high on these characteristics, their stress scores were significantly reduced.