Enhanced Stress Resilience Training for Faculty

Summary

Mounting evidence shows that burnout, a critical metric for dissatisfaction and distress, is a growing problem within medicine. Burnout is a syndrome associated with worse physician performance, patient outcomes, and hospital economics. Furthermore, researchers are coming to understand that burnout, diminished performance and the development of mental and physical illness are related. It has been proposed that chronic and overwhelming stress, in the absence of adequate coping skills, promotes performance deficits from surgical errors to poor professionalism due to the effects of stress on cognition.

Notably, in small studies of physicians and other high-stress/high-performance groups mindfulness-based interventions have shown exceptional promise in improving burnout and distress symptoms, protecting cognition, and enhancing meaningfulness and satisfaction in work. Nevertheless, in spite of promising results in various populations the translation of mindfulness-based interventions to real-world settings has been slow.

There is a paucity of quality research examining individually-based interventions, formal mindfulness training in physicians, or either of these things in the high stakes world of surgeons and anesthesiologists. To address these gaps, researchers have developed Enhanced Stress-Resilience Training (ESRT) based on MBSR, but streamlined and tailored for surgeons and anesthesiologists.

Moreover, researchers have refined the scales included in our psychosocial survey of well-being in order to sharpen our approach to the complex issue of physician well-being and factors influencing physician resilience, within Surgery and Anesthesia, at UCSF.

Conditions

• Burnout, Professional

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Enhanced Stress Resilience Training for Faculty Physicians

Enhanced Stress Resilience Training (ESRT) is derived from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with modifications to language, activities and contextualization to tailor the training to physicians involved in the operating room environment. ESRT consists of 5 weekly 1-hour group classes and 2-4 hour retreat. Classes focus on developing sustained attention and open monitoring in addition to training focused on stress and coping. Increasing duration (3-20 minutes per day) of guided mindfulness exercises are assigned each week. A 2-4 hour intensive retreat occurs at week 4 or 5. The central exercises of the training are the body scan, sitting meditation, qi gong and yoga. The weekly teaching sessions will be offered at various days and times each week in order to accommodate complicated physicians schedules that vary at each site. Participants can attend whichever session is most convenient. Daily practice will occur independently, with the duration reported weekly through text or email.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of California, San Francisco

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Carter C Lebares, MD · University of California, San Francisco

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

64 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-07-09

Primary Completion

2020-12-01

Completion

2020-12-01

Countries

• United States

Study Locations