Burnout in medical education: interventions from a co-creation process

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Occupational Health
• Psychology

Background:

• High burnout rates in medical education necessitate effective individual and organizational interventions.
• Limited research includes diverse stakeholder perspectives (students, trainees, staff).
• A bottom-up approach is needed to identify and implement targeted interventions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify and discuss interventions for preventing and mitigating burnout in medical education.
• To incorporate perspectives from multiple stakeholders through a co-creation process.
• To guide future implementation of burnout interventions.

Main Methods:

• Co-creation methodology involving workshops and a Delphi session with 96 participants.
• Workshops engaged medical students and trainees across different training years.
• Thematic analysis of transcribed workshop data using NVivo.

Main Results:

• Identified individual-level interventions: personalized coaching, health assessments, training.
• Distinguished organizational interventions for universities (e.g., pass-fail system) and training sites (e.g., flexible scheduling).
• Six interventions were applicable across all contexts, including onboarding programs.

Conclusions:

• Multistakeholder co-creation yielded interventions for burnout prevention and mitigation at individual and organizational levels.
• While organizational interventions are gaining recognition, individual strategies remain dominant in research.
• Further investigation into organizational interventions and their integration with individual strategies is crucial.