Logan McPherson1, Serena Wong2, Yarden Bornovski3, Brittany Russo4, Ahya Ali4, Andrew Bauerschmidt5, Tracey Milligan6, Sarah Parauda6
1New York Medical College, 2Cedars-Sinai, 3University of Utah, 4Westchester Medical Center, 5Westchester Medical Center Advanced Physician Services, PC, New York Medical College, 6Westchester Medical Center, New York Medical College
Objective:
Design and implement a mentorship program for neurology trainees.
Background:
Mentorship during medical residency has well-established benefits, including increased job satisfaction, professional development, and academic success. Mentors also serve to benefit from a mentor-mentee relationship and have reported increased career satisfaction and personal gratification through mentoring. Peer mentorship plays an additional crucial role in providing psychosocial support and improving residents’ overall satisfaction with their residency program.
Design/Methods:
We developed a pod-based mentorship curriculum in which residents and fellows are placed into pods consisting of two attendings from different subspecialties and trainees from varying postgraduate years. The curriculum consists of quarterly one-on-one mentor-mentee meetings, quarterly pod meetings for group discussions and activities, biannual meetings amongst all pods for educational activities, and suggested individual resources such as podcasts, journal articles, and books related to mentorship and career development. A 1-year post-implementation survey was given to the trainees to evaluate the effectiveness of the program and assess areas for improvement. We compared the results from this survey to a pre-implementation survey given the previous year.
Results:
14 trainees completed the pre-implementation survey and 9 completed the 1-year post-implementation survey. Prior to curriculum implementation, 59% of trainees found relationships with their mentors satisfying compared to 78% after implementation. Before implementation, 43% of respondents reported never having met with their mentors compared to 22% post-implementation. Prior to implementation, just 46% of respondents reported having enough opportunity for peer mentoring compared to 77% post-implementation.
Conclusions:
One year after implementing our mentorship curriculum, trainees report increased satisfaction with their mentors, more frequent mentor meetings, and greater opportunity for peer mentorship. Our curriculum may serve as a replicable model for a formalized mentorship curriculum that can be adopted by other residency programs.
Disclaimer: Abstracts were not reviewed by Neurology® and do not reflect the views of Neurology® editors or staff.