Promoting mental health in intensive care unit onboarding: a consensus-based iterative development of a...

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Psychology
• Healthcare Management

Background:

• Intensive care unit (ICU) professionals experience significant psychological stress.
• Existing mental health support during early training is underdeveloped and not aligned with modern education standards.
• There's a need to integrate psychosocial support into onboarding curricula.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a competency-based educational framework for ICU onboarding.
• To integrate mental health promotion into learning objectives across knowledge, reflection, and action domains.
• To provide a structured approach for enhancing mental well-being in early-career ICU staff.

Main Methods:

• A mixed-methods design combining consensus process and competency-based curricular mapping.
• Iterative refinement of guiding questions by a multidisciplinary panel.
• Mapping content to competency dimensions using principles of competency-based medical education and Miller's Pyramid.

Main Results:

• A competency-based framework with eight educational domains was developed.
• Domains include mental health relevance, ICU stressors, stress understanding, resilience, second victim phenomenon, support systems, self-reflection, and shared responsibility.
• The framework operationalizes competencies from knowledge to evaluation, aligning learning objectives, teaching, and assessment.

Conclusions:

• The framework advances health professions education by operationalizing recommendations into actionable components.
• It supports constructive alignment in curriculum design for mental health promotion.
• Further implementation and evaluation studies are needed to assess its impact.