Background: Mentorship has long been an impactful process in the training of medical students and physicians. It is apparent that young professionals benefit from mentorship, but how to maximize this benefit is unknown. We elected to approach the revitalization of our mentorship program through a 6-month human centered design (HCD) project to form a curriculum built by residents and medical students and supported by teaching faculty.
Purpose: To assemble a mentorship program catered to our facility limitations in order to positively impact resident well-being, resiliency, scholarly activity, and professional development as well as increasing faculty engagement and mentorship consistency.
Description: Our HCD project was facilitated by the UCSF “Better Lab” and supported by a grant from the Society of Hospital Medicine. Three months were spent exclusively data gathering utilizing a 36 item mentorship survey sent to residents, medical students, and faculty. Additional data was gathered from 14 intentionally sampled interviews in the local medical community and virtual semi-structured panel interviews from 14 exemplary and nationally recognized physicians. Subsequent thematic compilation of gathered data resulted in goal statements which where then applied through prioritization matrices and collaborative virtual whiteboards to categorize, prioritize, and brainstorm program ideas.
Conclusions: Resulting curriculum collectively yielded attributes of low mentor to mentee ratio with pod assignment. Mentorship pods were targeted to encourage peer mentorship among residents and students. Scheduled monthly digital check-in and quarterly in-person meetings with goal-oriented checklists were selected for scheduling flexibility and consistency among pods in order to assure mentees are receiving both scholarly, professional, and emotional support. We have seen an improvement in our Mini-Z burn out scores, increased scholarly activity, and improved mentorship consistency since its implementation.