Better Together Physician Coaching: Mitigating Burnout in UME

NCT ID: NCT05822375

Last Updated: 2024-10-04

Study Results

Results pending

The study team has not published outcome measurements, participant flow, or safety data for this trial yet. Check back later for updates.

Basic Information

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Recruitment Status

COMPLETED

Clinical Phase

NA

Total Enrollment

490 participants

Study Classification

INTERVENTIONAL

Study Start Date

2023-08-01

Study Completion Date

2024-09-01

Brief Summary

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Better Together Physician Coaching ("Better Together", or "BT"), a 4-month, web-based positive psychology multimodal coaching program was built to decrease burnout in medical trainees. Here, the investigators seek to understand it's efficacy in University of Colorado School of Medicine (CU SOM) clinicians

Aim 1: Implement Better Together in undergraduate medical education settings for medical students 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, loneliness, and moral injury.

Aim 3: Advance the field of coaching for clinicians through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to medical student wellbeing.

Detailed Description

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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. 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 medical students of all gender identities.

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 medical students.

Aim 1: Implement Better Together in the undergraduate medical student population

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, loneliness, and moral injury.

Aim 3: Advance the field of coaching for clinicians through innovation and dissemination of evidence-based approaches to medical student wellbeing.

Conditions

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Burnout, Professional

Study Design

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Allocation Method

RANDOMIZED

Intervention Model

SEQUENTIAL

This is a randomized controlled trial. All enrolled participants will complete the pretest baseline survey. After baseline data collection is completed, the participants will be randomized into either a control or intervention group. This randomized controlled trial study design will offer the BT coaching to the intervention group for the duration of 4-months (February 1st 2023- May 31st 2023) and to the control group for the duration of 4-months (September 1st 2023 - December 31st 2023).

At two different timepoints, all participants will be offered surveys containing the following validated indices: burnout, imposter syndrome, self-compassion, moral injury, loneliness, and flourishing. All participants will be offered the survey at baseline- September 2023 (T0), post intervention- January 2024 (T1).
Primary Study Purpose

PREVENTION

Blinding Strategy

SINGLE

Outcome Assessors
Data will be de-identified prior to analysis

Study Groups

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Intervention

Will be offered the BT coaching intervention over 4-months (Sept 1st 2023- Dec 31st 2023).

Group Type EXPERIMENTAL

Better Together Physician Coaching

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Better Together Physician Coaching Program thought-based coaching. This type of coaching focuses on thoughts and beliefs. It combines a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) model with mindfulness-based awareness and integrates theories of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), nonattachment, and radical questioning from Socratic and Greek philosophies. BT delivers a robust coaching experience via a 4-month web-based, group-coaching model. This novel program allows residents to participate as actively as they are inclined and able, offering flexibility via multiple modalities of coaching: twice weekly group coaching calls, unlimited anonymous written coaching, and weekly self-study modules that are housed on a secure members-only website.

Waitlist control

Will be offered the coaching intervention following 4-month waitlist control (Feb 1st 2024 - May 31st 2024).

Group Type NO_INTERVENTION

No interventions assigned to this group

Interventions

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Better Together Physician Coaching

Better Together Physician Coaching Program thought-based coaching. This type of coaching focuses on thoughts and beliefs. It combines a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) model with mindfulness-based awareness and integrates theories of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), nonattachment, and radical questioning from Socratic and Greek philosophies. BT delivers a robust coaching experience via a 4-month web-based, group-coaching model. This novel program allows residents to participate as actively as they are inclined and able, offering flexibility via multiple modalities of coaching: twice weekly group coaching calls, unlimited anonymous written coaching, and weekly self-study modules that are housed on a secure members-only website.

Intervention Type BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

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Inclusion Criteria

* current medical students at one of the 5 US undergraduate medical education sites

Exclusion Criteria

* non-medical students
Minimum Eligible Age

18 Years

Maximum Eligible Age

65 Years

Eligible Sex

ALL

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Sponsors

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University of Colorado, Denver

OTHER

Sponsor Role lead

Responsible Party

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Responsibility Role SPONSOR

Locations

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University of Colorado School of Medicine

Aurora, Colorado, United States

Site Status

Countries

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United States

References

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Villwock JA, Sobin LB, Koester LA, Harris TM. Impostor syndrome and burnout among American medical students: a pilot study. Int J Med Educ. 2016 Oct 31;7:364-369. doi: 10.5116/ijme.5801.eac4. Mantri S, Lawson JM, Wang Z, Koenig HG. Identifying Moral Injury in Healthcare Professionals: The Moral Injury Symptom Scale-HP. J Relig Health. 2020 Oct;59(5):2323-2340. doi: 10.1007/s10943-020-01065-w. Kelly-Hedrick M, Rodriguez MM, Ruble AE, Wright SM, Chisolm MS. Measuring Flourishing Among Internal Medicine and Psychiatry Residents. J Grad Med Educ. 2020 Jun;12(3):312-319. doi: 10.4300/JGME-D-19-00793.1. Fainstad T, Mann A, Suresh K, Shah P, Dieujuste N, Thurmon K, Jones CD. Effect of a Novel Online Group-Coaching Program to Reduce Burnout in Female Resident Physicians: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Netw Open. 2022 May 2;5(5):e2210752. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.10752. Erratum In: JAMA Netw Open. 2022 Jun 1;5(6):e2220348. Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). Maslach Burnout Inventory: Third edition. In C. P. Zalaquett & R. J. Wood (Eds.), Evaluating stress: A book of resources (pp. 191-218). Scarecrow Education. Neff KD. Self-Compassion Scale. PsycTESTS Dataset. 2012. doi:10.1037/t10178-000 Hughes ME, Waite LJ, Hawkley LC, Cacioppo JT. A Short Scale for Measuring Loneliness in Large Surveys: Results From Two Population-Based Studies. Res Aging. 2004;26(6):655-672. doi: 10.1177/0164027504268574.

Reference Type BACKGROUND

Mann A, Fainstad T, Sullivan I, Ritz EM, SooHoo JR, Mechaber HF, Shah A. Medical students: They're not just little doctors! Impact of an online group-coaching program on medical student well-being: A randomized clinical trial. PLoS One. 2025 Aug 12;20(8):e0328546. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0328546. eCollection 2025.

Reference Type DERIVED
PMID: 40794712 (View on PubMed)

Other Identifiers

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23-0651

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id

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