gms | German Medical Science

Background: Students of medicine experience high psychomental stress during their studies. Complex study requirements paired with a high performance ideal lead to an even higher performance effort with decreased mindfulness towards one’s own health. PsyMentFreiburg (PMF) offers a competency-oriented approach in the area of self and stress management, teaching of coping skills and development of an individual professional attitude. The program intends to alleviate stressful situations via improved self-perception and self-guidance, to stabilize mental health and boost motivation for one’s studies.

Summary of work: PMF provides a wide range of offers for med students in their 1^st to 10^th semester through

• Needs-oriented workshops tailored to study stage (basic, clinic I and clinic II), e.g. stress and self-management, dealing with errors, decision making, cooperative team work, resilience, interdisciplinary contexts
• mindfulness-based coaching (MedOn!, 5 sessions of 1.5 hours each)
• psychoeducational content on the platform InTensity

The needs-oriented workshops are evaluated via the evaluation platform of the University Freiburg (scale 1=very good to 6=not good at all).

The MedON! courses are evaluated at three points in time (pre, post, follow-up) using established online questionnaires (questionnaires about mindfulness, attitude, life satisfaction, mood, calmness, coping).

Summary of results: N=99 participants out of 13 workshops evaluated their workshop in the whole as very good (M=1.33, SD=0.22, Likert scale=1: very good to 6: very poor).

In the MedON! courses mindfulness, life satisfaction and individual coping strategies increased significantly in a pre-post comparison conducted with paired t-tests across all groups (N=68 participants) (see figure 1 [Fig. 1]).

Discussion and conclusion: Needs-based WS for medical students were well accepted overall and rated as very good.

The results indicate that our mindfulness courses do improve individual mindfulness, stress management and even life satisfaction. But the results must be checked for causality in a control group design.

Take home message: Improved self-awareness, stress management and a healthy use of one’s own resources are skills that are relevant to all healthcare professions.

Obviously, these skills can be taught as part of the course curriculum in medicine. This way, they could increase work satisfaction as well as Mental Health.