Clinical Hospital Medicine Fellow Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Background: Work engagement, a positive work-related state of mind, is associated with increased job satisfaction, retention, and quality of patient care. National well-being strategies have emphasized the protective nature of work engagement in burnout reduction. Physician trainees are a particularly vulnerable population; at our institution, only 52% of fellowship trainees experienced high levels of engagement. A critical knowledge gap exists regarding how fellow trainee physicians conceptualize and experience work engagement, with an urgent need to elucidate potentially modifiable factors that promote engagement. Objective: To explore factors that influence work engagement among pediatric clinical fellowship trainees and obtain a deeper understanding of factors that may be leveraged to optimize trainee work engagement and mitigate burnout. Design/Methods: This IRB-approved qualitative study utilizing semi-structured interviews with pediatric sub-specialty fellows is being conducted at a large, quaternary care children’s hospital with >40 ACGME-accredited graduate medical education programs and 280 pediatric sub-specialty fellows. Interview questions, informed by the Job-Demands-Resources theoretical framework, explore work engagement and the job resources and demands that influence engagement. Participants were recruited from 155 fellows who responded to a work engagement survey, employed by this research team. Maximum variation sampling was used to include individuals from different years of training, gender, race/ethnicity, and sub-specialty. Fifteen interviews have been completed to date and we anticipate 5-7 additional interviews to achieve theoretical sufficiency. Ongoing iterative analysis has informed the development of a codebook, utilizing an inductive-deductive combined approach. We plan to use thematic analysis to identify patterns in the data and generate themes. Final analysis will be shared with focus groups to assess the trustworthiness and credibility of the data. Completion of data collection, analysis, and theme generation is anticipated to occur by March 2024.
