Generation of a New Instrument to Measure Well-being in Medical Residents

Background:

The residency promotes learning, improves the development of skills, competencies, practices and attitudes characteristic of each different medical specialty. Just as the health of the children reflects the health and future of a population, the university and the residency are likely to reflect the quality of the health system.

Collapsed and overloaded health systems rely on residents as a low-cost human resource. The residency program should be characterized by a supervised learning system to promote progressive independence in decision making and clinical reasoning. This learning experience can be affected by many factors like stress, sleep deprivation, poor learning environments, relocation issues, vertical structure, excess of administrative tasks and work overload among others. This characteristics of the learning/working environment have an individual direct impact on safety, processing, learning and decision-making capacity and a group effect on safety and quality of patient's care.

Residents are a population of high risk for depression, burnout and social isolation. The well-being of residents is a key aspect of their training that can be monitored as a security event, managed and actively promoted. While several strategies are used to measure the degree of work overload and its impact on training residents, none seems to be holistic and appropriate to understand the dimensions of this complex phenomenon. The aim is to generate and validate a tool to measure the well-being of residents considering their multidimensional features.

Research Question: Is it possible to built a valid instrument to measure well-being in residents of medical residency programs?