Resilience in medical radiation science students: A concept analysis in the context of challenging clinical...

Medical radiation science students experiences many challenging clinical interactions (CCIs) during work-integrated learning (WIL). These challenges can negatively impact their wellbeing, professional development, and patient outcomes. Resilience has been noted as a contributing factor to achieving positive outcomes, such as enabling students to achieve their clinical learning objectives despite these challenges. This implies the need to incorporate resilience training into medical radiation science curricula. However, resilience has differing contextual and general definitions which could hinder medical radiation educators' efforts to develop appropriate resilience-building strategies. This concept analysis provides a discipline-specific understanding of resilience in medical radiation science students, and how it relates to other concepts.

A concept analysis design, regarded as a philosophical inquiry, was used. Specifically, this study adopted Walker and Avant's eight-step approach to concept analysis. Included literature were purposively selected from PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, CINAHL, Google Scholar, and English dictionaries. The data were analysed in terms of clusters of recurring phenomena.

The analysis identified different understanding of resilience as used in medical radiations. Adversity/perceived adversity was identified as the main antecedent of resilience, with many factors. These informed the identification of key defining attributes (n=6), consequences (n=6), and related cases (n=2), with coping seen to have a cyclical relationship with resilience. The contextual definition of resilience in medical radiation science students was identified as using effective coping strategies and available resources to build confidence, push through, survive, and thrive in CCIs.

The consequences of resilience identified highlight the need to develop resilience in medical radiation science students. Researchers and educators may adopt the antecedents, defining attributes, empirical referents, related cases, consequences, and contextual definition identified in this study to guide the development of a resilience framework in medical radiation science education. It is advised that strategies to build resilience in medical radiation science students should consider both personal and societal factors due to the multifaceted nature of the concept.