Medical student resilience strategies: A content analysis of medical students’ portfolios

INTRODUCTION: Stress and burnout among medical students is a well-recognized concern. A student’s ability to employ resilience strategies to self-regulate behaviour is critical to the student’s future career as a physician. METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed a sampling of year 1, 2 and 5 portfolio essays focused on the Personal Development competency and performance milestones, written by 49 students from three different classes in a 5-year programme devoted to training physician investigators. Two medical educators used a framework established by Jensen and colleagues (2008) to identify the nature and prevalence of various resilience strategies (valuing the physician role, self-awareness, personal arena, professional arena, professional support and personal support) medical students reported in portfolio essays. RESULTS: All students documented at least one strategy in their essays each year. In all years, the most commonly documented strategies were in the personal arena (95.7% of year 1, 98% of year 2 and 87.8% of year 5 portfolios). The least frequently documented strategy in all years was professional support (42.8% of year 1, 38.8% of year 2, and 28.6% of year 5 portfolios). Year 5 portfolios discussed personal support strategies (79.6%) more frequently than year 1 (53.1%) and year 2 (59.2%) portfolios. DISCUSSION: The results suggest that medical students can identify stressors and articulate resilience strategies that can be employed to potentially address them.