Assessing Resilience among Medical Teachers: A Necessary Step in Building More Equipped Medical Teaching: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Resilience among medical teachers is not only a subject of academic inquiry but also a growing body of literature. It encompasses perceiving the way of adaption of strategies in times of adversity or change as well as enable people carry on their jobs and lives.

Aim: To assess overall scores and scores of seven domains of resilience-assessment like vision, determination, interaction, relationships, problem solving, organisation and self-confidence.

Materials and Methods: This observational cross-sectional study was carried out in the Department of Physiology BSMC&H, Bankura on 60 medical educators for the period starting in April, 2021 and ending in February, 2022. The Resilience Assessment Questionnaire (RAQ) in Google form was sent to the subjects through email for participating in the study. The responses of RAQ were recorded and analysed by Microsoft excel- 2019. Results were represented in the form of descriptive statistics.

Results: The data was obtained from 60 medical educators of the institute having mean age 49.63 years and comprising of both sexes with at least 10 years of experience of teaching. With respect to Overall scores, 83.3% of the subjects (n=50) had scores between 35-140 (low score) while only 16.7% (n=10) were found to be pretty resilient. Regarding determination scores 51.7% (n=31) subjects had scores between 5-15 (low level of determination and 33.3% (n=20) had considerable determination (score 16-20) while only 15% (n=9) were determined persons (score 21-25). A total of 50% (n=30) subjects were not very good in Problems solving score, 28.4% (n=17) liked and succeeded in solving problems. About 30% (n=18) scored 16-25 and had considerable self-confidence whereas 5% (n=3) scored poorly. In less than 15% of the subjects, the Score of Vision (n=10), Interaction (n=6), Relationship (n=14) and Organisational (n=5) skill were found to be in the higher range (score 21-25) whereas 85% (n=50, 54, 46 & 55 respectively) subjects scored poorly (score 5-20) in these categories.

Conclusion: In the present study, resilience of ≥50% participants were found to be at a lower level. It draws attention of medical educators to reconsider the multidimensional factors that influenced their resilience. It may be proposed that brave decisions and actions aiming to improve resilience must be made by medical educators to help making medical students responsible doctors of tomorrow.