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Healthcare professionals need to be resilient and maintain an optimal level of performance and wellbeing across a range of different clinical situations. Many of these situations are challenging, such as carrying out a practical procedure on an acutely ill patient or communicating with an aggressive patient.
Athletes are also expected to have developed similar performance-related resilience to ensure that they consistently perform at an optimal level. This has led to the increasing interest in applying a sport psychology perspective to the design of educational interventions for healthcare professionals.
This project, funded by The MPS Foundation, is the first of its kind to use insights from sport psychology talent development to inform the design of an intervention for enhancing the resilience of healthcare professionals. It focuses on individual resilience strengths related to professional performance, instead of general personal psychological traits.
The research team, led by Professor John Sandars from Edge Hill University, is developing an innovative educational intervention for a range of different medical and surgical specialties, which is based on similar approaches that have been used to develop performance-related resilience for elite sports athletes. The project intends to collaboratively co-create an educational intervention with intended users and an experienced multi-disciplinary research team of sport psychologists and medical educationalists.
The training package will also allow both individual and group implementation, but with a personalised approach.
So far, Phase 1 has been completed and has clearly demonstrated that there are similar performance resilience factors – such as the use of active preparation before managing a challenging situation and learning from mistakes – between doctors from a variety of specialties and elite-athletes. The next phase of the project is to conduct a survey across a larger number of doctors, so that the questionnaire can be developed.
There are still opportunities to take part in this project. If you would like to be included in the survey for developing the questionnaire, please contact Liam Jenkins at jenkinsl@edgehill.ac.uk.
Further information on the project can be found at thempsfoundation.org