Having completed the pilot offering of these sessions in Spring 2023, I wanted to offer my strong recommendation AND a note of caution on this opportunity.

A year ago, I struggled as a program director with the challenges our residents are facing. While residency has always been intense and demanding, the environment felt shifted in recent years. The work hours limits– changed to benefit safety and protect residents – have also compacted very intense experiences into shorter timeframes. Patients and families bring extreme challenges and heightened emotions to interactions and doctors need to recognize, absorb, and manage these as part of the care process. At times, our efforts to emphasize physicians’ own well-being can have the counterintuitive effect of “What?! Now it’s on me to do all this and make sure I feel good doing it?!”.

I was looking for perspective, and concrete tools to understand and address these challenges. This series of sessions did that. Time is precious, and I am very defensive of my time. This was well worth it. The content moves through a series of highly interactive and engaging sessions to experience and intentionally practice skills. These skills are adapted from an evidence-based treatment model, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and offer ways to manage our own emotional reactions to stressors, including being faced with others’ intense emotions. These skills are also helpful for navigating complex interpersonal interactions while maintaining our own integrity and self-respect.

My caution is to consider whether you are able to commit and fully protect the time required. To get full value for your time and effort, you’ll need to be able to be at (and not multitasking through) most or all of the sessions. Less than that would diminish your own and the group's learning. As hard as it is to rearrange clinical and personal responsibilities, the longitudinal commitment is a necessary part of this process. If you’ve had the experience of going to a CME session, being impressed with the content, and then leaving and finding it unrealistic to incorporate into your everyday practices, consider this longitudinal commitment the workaround you need to ensure space to take in the training and progressively incorporate it into your daily interactions with trainees, colleagues, leaders/administrators, and patients.

So it isn’t really a caution – it’s a suggestion that this will be the highest yield to you if you prepare to protect the time and commit to the curiosity. Reach out to your program leadership and/or division director to confirm their support and consider this something to cite to strengthen their year-end GME and ACGME program reports on efforts to develop PD and core faculty capabilities and/or core residency/fellowship competencies. The content of training encompasses self-awareness, communication skills, navigating challenging encounters, and supporting trainee well-being…all areas of interest to ACGME.