NCT05822375

Better Together Physician Coaching: Mitigating Burnout in UME

Better Together Physician Coaching: Mitigating Burnout in Undergraduate Medical Education

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 490 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Colorado, Denver · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Better Together Physician Coaching ("Better Together", or "BT"), a 4-month, web-based positive psychology multimodal coaching program was built to decrease burnout in medical trainees. Here, the investigators seek to understand it's efficacy in University of Colorado School of Medicine (CU SOM) clinicians Aim 1: Implement Better Together in undergraduate medical education settings for medical students Aim 2: Assess outcomes: primary: reduce burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Index (goal: 10% relative improvement), and secondary: self-compassion, imposter syndrome, flourishing, loneliness, and moral injury. Aim 3: Advance the field of coaching for clinicians through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to medical student wellbeing.

Detailed description

Burnout refers to feelings of exhaustion, negativism, and reduced personal efficacy resulting from chronic workplace stress. In healthcare, burnout leads to increased medical errors, poorer patient care and negatively affects professional development and retention. Burnout is a growing problem that begins early in medical training. Professional coaching is a metacognition tool with a sustainable positive effect on physician well-being but typically relies on expensive consultants or time-consuming faculty development, often making it infeasible for medical training programs to offer. To overcome this barrier, the investigators created Better Together Physician Coaching (BT) a 4-month coaching program for at the University of Colorado (CU). BT includes regular online group-coaching, written coaching, and weekly self-study modules delivered by physician life coaches (Co-PIs). In 2021, the investigators studied BT in a group of female-identifying resident trainees at CU and found that the program significantly improved burnout, imposter syndrome, and self-compassion. This finding supports previous data that life coaching is effective for physicians and physicians in training. The investigators initially focused on women since burnout affects women to a greater degree than their male counterparts, and may have long-lasting consequences on their careers, contributing to a "leaky pipeline" effect. The pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 101 BT women participants demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in burnout, self-compassion, and imposter syndrome in the intervention group. The investigators now seek to understand if the coaching program is also effective in medical students of all gender identities. The hypothesis is that Better Together Physician Coaching ("Better Together", or "BT"), a 4-month, web-based positive psychology multimodal coaching program will result in decreased burnout in medical students. Aim 1: Implement Better Together in the undergraduate medical student population Aim 2: Assess outcomes: primary: reduce burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Index (goal: 10% relative improvement), and secondary: self-compassion, imposter syndrome, flourishing, loneliness, and moral injury. Aim 3: Advance the field of coaching for clinicians through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to medical student wellbeing.

Conditions

• Burnout, Professional

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Better Together Physician Coaching	Better Together Physician Coaching Program thought-based coaching. This type of coaching focuses on thoughts and beliefs. It combines a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) model with mindfulness-based awareness and integrates theories of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), nonattachment, and radical questioning from Socratic and Greek philosophies. BT delivers a robust coaching experience via a 4-month web-based, group-coaching model. This novel program allows residents to participate as actively as they are inclined and able, offering flexibility via multiple modalities of coaching: twice weekly group coaching calls, unlimited anonymous written coaching, and weekly self-study modules that are housed on a secure members-only website.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-08-01
• Primary completion: 2024-01-01
• Completion: 2024-09-01
• First posted: 2023-04-20
• Last updated: 2024-10-04

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States