ACGME Well-Being Podcasts

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.  .

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. .

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.