ACGME AWARE Well-Being Podcasts

In this episode of the AWARE Podcast’s Cognition and Well-Being series, Stuart Slavin, MD, MEd and Anne Gravel Sullivan, PhD discuss the relationship between belonging and well-being with Dr. Mukta Panda, MD, MACP, FRCP-London. Dr. Panda, who is the Assistant Dean for Well-Being and Medical Student Education, as well as a Professor of Medicine at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Chattanooga, reflects upon her own struggle with well-being and how it ultimately led her to study the importance of a personal sense of belonging. Additionally, they analyze how well-being can be achieved when students and physicians can comfortably be their authentic selves, rather than attempting to fit into the molds that they feel pressured into being.

In this new episode of the Aware Well-Being Podcast Systems and Research series, Lyuba Konopasek, MD, Senior Associate Dean for Education at the Frank Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, discusses her efforts to develop a comprehensive approach to addressing issues that impact resident and faculty well-being. As the former DIO at New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Konopasek drew on business literature, as well as her lived experiences in the GME community, to construct her “Recognize, Respond and Refer” model for mitigating and responding to burnout, anxiety and other forms of distress among clinicians.

This month Dr. Stuart Slavin, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, joins pediatric hospitalist Dr. Anu Gorukanti and neurologist Dr. Jeffrey Dewey, who launched their careers as specialists during the pandemic, for this AWARE episode on the common challenges presented in the transition from residency to fellowship or practice. Together they explore what impact these challenges have on graduates, how the pandemic has amplified them, and share their personal stories and insights on how residents and fellows can prepare for these challenges.

Pathologist Suzanne Powell and Neurologist Crystal Yeo share the results of their study of burnout, resilience and well-being with residents at Houston Methodist Hospital upon the advent of Hurricane Harvey. We discuss their results, which show the surprising impact that volunteerism can have on clinician well-being.

Dr. Stuart Slavin, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-being, talks with a group of residents about how COVID-19 has impacted their well-being during training. They discuss how the practices of Psychological First Aid, an approach developed by a group of international non-profits to train people to help others experiencing trauma, has the potential to equip residents with strategies for managing the many challenges faced by their community members in crisis. Pediatric hospitalist Anu Gorukanti, a recent graduate of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center; Clare Brady, a second-year family medicine resident at Northwestern in Chicago, and Shivani Parikh, a third-year OB/Gyn resident at TriHealth in Chicago join us for this conversation. 

In this episode, Stuart Slavin, MD, MEd, ACGME's Senior Scholar for Well-Being, discusses the role of Psychological First Aid (PFA) in providing support for individuals who have suffered some kind of trauma or other devastating event. We discuss the relevance of the approach to supporting to clinicians, patients and others managing the stressors of the pandemic, as well as the specific strategies used in PFA, which was collaboratively developed by a coalition of international military and non-governmental organizations as a response to victims of war, natural disasters and other traumatic events.

Dr. Stuart Slavin, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, returns to discuss how the transition from medical school to residency and from residency/fellowship to practice--already a vulnerable time for physicians--has been impacted by COVID-19. Using William Bridges' tripartite model of transitions as a framework, Dr. Gravel Sullivan and Dr. Slavin explore the implications of the many changes brought about by the pandemic on well-being--particularly for physicians undergoing transitions. They discuss measures individuals and programs can take to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on the well-being of incoming and graduating residents.

With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, physicians and other clinicians are suddenly having to process vast amounts of new information on how to manage patient care as well as safely protect themselves. In the midst of the pandemic, attending to their own mental health and well-being is vital--but wading through yet an additional set of resources may seem overwhelming.

In this 30-minute podcast, we interview Stuart Slavin, MD, ACGME’s Senior Scholar for Well-being, who provides a synthesis and distillation of well-being strategies for residents and other clinicians specific to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Dr Slavin has pulled from resources including psychology and psychiatry, peer support programming, the military and VA system, and literature for support of first responders to mass casualty events.

In this interview with Dr. Jo Shapiro, Associate Professor of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School and founder of the Brigham and Women’s Center for Professionalism and Peer support, we discuss what hospitals can do to establish similar programs at their own institutions. Dr. Shapiro shares insights from her experience of building the Center’s program and discusses the evidence behind its design, highlighting those elements essential to developing a program that can make a tangible impact in reducing clinician stress and enhancing well-being. 

In this follow-up podcast to episode six, we continue to talk with Jo Shapiro, MD, founder of the Brigham and Women’s Center for Professionalism and Peer Support, to explore what hospitals can do to establish similar programs at their own institutions. Dr. Shapiro shares insights from her experience of building the Center’s program, discussing its design and critical elements for success in order to make an impact on enhancing clinician well-being. 

In this second interview, Dr. Srijan Sen, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, and Dr. Stuart Slavin, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, discuss the individual and situational factors that contribute to burnout and depression among medical students and residents. They discuss some of the strategies residents develop to cope with burnout--both the healthy and less healthy--and explore what programs and institutions can do to mitigate the effects of stress among residents. 

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In this third interview, Dr. Sydney Ey, Professor of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health and Science University Medical School and Dr. Stuart Slavin, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, discuss how faculty teaching in residency programs can support not only residents they work with, but each other. In a health care system and culture that often privileges efficiency and detachment over self-care and the expression of emotion, learning how to identify those in need of support –and providing effective support--can be difficult. Dr. Ey and Dr. Slavin discuss a range of strategies—some eminently practical, others ground-breakingly disruptive-for challenging some of the pervasive mindsets and the culture of silence that tend to perpetuate themselves in clinical learning environments.

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Practicing physicians have one of the most stressful jobs in the U.S., making them particularly susceptible to burnout.  The impacts of prolonged burnout have enormous implications for physicians and their families, as well as their patients and the health care system itself. In this first of three interviews with Sydney Ey, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health and Science University School of Medicine, we explore that institution’s successful Resident and Faculty Wellness and Peer Support programs, which she helped establish. Dr. Ey discusses the specific strategies she found most effective in helping physicians grapple with their experience of stress and build their resilience. Dr. Ey’s experiences provide insights for Program Directors and others in the GME community seeking to establish their own systems of support for physicians and others working in the clinical learning environment. Dr. Ey discusses some common obstacles, as well as key facilitators, to the development of such programs that helped pave the way for the OHSU programs' success.

ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being Dr. Stuart Slavin discusses what residency programs can do to help physicians cope with negative mindsets and impostor phenomenon. Dr. Slavin provides an overview of several concepts from cognitive psychology, such as explanatory style and emotional self-regulation, that programs can introduce to their local curriculum to help residents and faculty enhance their well-being.

ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being Stuart Slavin, MD returns to share strategies for developing the metacognitive skills needed to help us address our individual negative mindsets and improve our well-being. Dr. Slavin argues that cultivating these skills can help residents challenge the entrenched “automatic thinking” that so readily develops as a defense to the stressors of the clinical learning environment.

ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, Dr. Stuart Slavin, describes his work educating medical residents and Program Directors across the country in cognitive approaches to well-being and introduces a framework for approaching well-being in GME programs. Topics include the common negative mindsets to which residents and others working in stressful clinical environments can become vulnerable.  Dr. Slavin maintains that medical students transitioning into residency are particularly at risk for falling prey to these mindsets.

In this interview, ACGME Senior Scholar for Well-Being, Stuart Slavin, MD, explores the experience of impostor phenomenon in clinical settings. Dr. Slavin focuses in particular on how medical students transitioning into residency experience impostor phenomenon and explores its multiple impacts on physicians training in the clinical learning environment.

In this interview with Dr. Srijan Sen, Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg Professor of Depression and Neurosciences and Associate Chair for Research and Research Faculty Development at the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine, we discuss his research into the factors that contribute to burnout and depression among medical students and residents. 

Dr. Sen led a ten-year, multi-institutional study of medical interns to determine how genetic factors are involved in moderating the relationship between stress and depression. In this interview, Dr. Sen talks about what inspired him to pioneer research into well-being among medical interns, what his findings suggest for how programs can better prepare residents for the stressors they face during clinical training--and his hopes for how residents learn to cultivate the supports they need to thrive, not just survive, during residency.