"Becoming a Person Who Does Self-Care": How Health Care Trainees Naturalistically Develop Successful Self-Care...

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Professional Development
• Health Psychology

Background:

• Self-care is crucial for health professionals to manage stress and maintain functioning.
• Healthcare trainees often lack self-care practices and adequate educational focus.
• Insufficient self-care can negatively impact professional performance and well-being.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a grounded theory explaining how health trainees become successful users of self-care.
• To identify the developmental stages and underlying processes of self-care adoption in healthcare students.

Main Methods:

• Conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 students across various healthcare disciplines.
• Utilized grounded theory methodology for data analysis to build a theoretical model.

Main Results:

• Identified four iterative phases in the development of self-care: Wake-Up Call, Building Skills, Gaining Confidence, and Building an Identity.
• The developed model explains factors contributing to both successful and unsuccessful self-care adoption among trainees.

Conclusions:

• Presents the first theory on how health trainees develop effective self-care habits.
• Findings have critical implications for designing targeted interventions and curricula in medical training.
• Recommends augmenting natural self-care processes, linking to values, and promoting faculty support for trainee self-care.