Quality of Life of Medical Students during Clinical Clerkship

Resilience: A panacea for burnout in medical students during clinical training?: A narrative review

Clinical rotations or clerkships are a necessary part of medical education but are associated with significant psychiatric morbidity, including burnout and psychological distress. This review aims to explore the role of resilience as a protective factor and assess the effectiveness of resilience-building interventions. We conducted a narrative review using the Medline database via PubMed. The search strategy included the terms "resilience," "burnout," and "medical students." A total of 52 articles were included and synthesized narratively. Burnout affects 40% to 80% of medical students, with higher rates during their clinical years. Resilience was consistently found to be a stable, protective factor that buffers against stress and burnout. Most research focused on medical students, regardless of whether they are in clinical training. However, the effectiveness of resilience interventions varied. Interventions such as psychological workshops and curriculum changes showed mixed results, with competence-based approaches showing the most promise for long-term benefits. Resilience is a critical target for improving medical students' psychological health and reducing burnout during clinical training. Future interventions should focus on combining psychological support with competence-based training to equip students for the challenges ahead.

Medical students' resilience: a protective role on stress and quality of life in clerkship

BACKGROUND

Resilience refers to the ability to be flexible and adaptive in response to challenges. Medical students in clerkship who are transitioning from medical studies to clinical practice face a variety of workplace demands that can lead to negative learning experiences and poor quality of life. This study explored whether medical students' resilience plays a protective role against the stresses incurred during workplace training and on their professional quality of life during clerkships.

METHODS

This was a 1-year prospective web-based questionnaire study comprising one cohort of medical students in their fifth year who were working as clerks as part of their 6-year medical education programme at one medical school in Taiwan between September 2017 and July 2018. Web-based, validated, structured, self-administered questionnaires were used to measure the students' resilience at the beginning of the clerkship and their perceived training stress (i.e. physical and psychological demands) and professional quality of life (i.e. burnout and compassion satisfaction) at each specialty rotation. Ninety-three medical students who responded to our specialty rotation surveys at least three times in the clerkship were included and hierarchical regressions were performed.

RESULTS

This study verified the negative effects of medical students' perceived training stress on burnout and compassion satisfaction. However, although the buffering (protective) effects of resilience were observed for physical demands (one key risk factor related to medical students' professional quality of life), this was not the case for psychological demands (another key risk factor). In addition, through the changes in R square (∆R²) values of the hierarchical regression building, our study found that medical students' perceived training stresses played a critical role on explaining their burnout but their resilience on their compassion satisfaction.

CONCLUSIONS

Medical students' resilience demonstrated a buffering effect on the negative relationship between physical demands and professional quality of life during clerkships. Moreover, different mechanisms (predictive paths) leading to medical students' professional quality of life such as burnout and compassion satisfaction warrant additional studies.