JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Wellbeing among healthcare professionals and students is low and declining. Comprehensive wellbeing curriculum streams within medical schools are needed to enhance medical student wellbeing.

Objective:

To develop an evidence-based longitudinal wellbeing curriculum for medical students.

Methods:

We compared the results of a systematic review of wellbeing interventions for medical and healthcare students with an audit of the current wellbeing offering at a UK medical school to identify gaps. We then gained stakeholder views through interviews and a co-production workshop with student, educator, and patient representation.

Results:

The systematic review revealed that mindfulness, mental health programmes (education on stress-management, self-care, and accessing mental health services), and pass/fail grading had evidence in support of their effectiveness. The audit revealed that there was a dedicated mental health programme that focused on mindfulness for first year students. The stakeholder engagement activities included interviews with 10 students, and a co-production workshop with nine educators, and one patient representative. These resulted in the following recommendations: creating resources (such as a “wellbeing handbook”), removing grade ranking, extending the existing wellbeing programme into the clinical phase of training and including specific sessions on coping with perceived failure and processing trauma, and signposting to available pastoral and wellbeing services.

Conclusions:

We were able to identify gaps in the wellbeing offering at a UK Medical School and generate actionable recommendations. Together with the existing wellbeing offering, these recommendations can be packaged as a comprehensive wellbeing curriculum stream that is likely to improve medical student wellbeing. Clinical Trial: n/a