Better Together Physician Coaching: Addressing Burnout Amongst Male-Identifying Medicine Trainees

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.6 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 male-identifying medical trainees. There is some literature suggesting that women are more likely to engage in wellness interventions, and may be more likely to report symptoms of burnout on surveys than men despite actual experiences. There is data to suggest that men and women are affected to different degrees by wellness interventions and there is also data that shows different effects (both positive and negative) of mixing genders. The investigators eventually plan to offer coaching to a co-ed group however realize that if efficacy is different in this group, it will be unknown if the difference is due to men being affected to a different degree than women, or if the difference is due to mixing the genders. Before testing the program in a co-ed group, the investigators first need to see if the coaching is effective in men. This project will test Better Together amongst male-identifying participants, and the program will be evaluated by the CU research team to see if the program has the same impacts.

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 male-identifying residents in medical training at CU.

• Aim 1: Implement Better Together in for male-identifying trainees in Graduate Medical Education at the University of Colorado.
• 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 and moral injury.
• Aim 3: Advance the field of coaching in GME through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to GME trainee wellbeing.