Catalyst Awards

The Massachusetts General Hospital project aims to reduce burnout among physician trainees (residents and fellows) who are new mothers, a group particularly vulnerable due to the competing demands of medical training and the physical and emotional challenges of childbearing. Trainee mothers encounter unique obstacles that their male counterparts do not, including pregnancy-related stigma, social isolation, and insufficient workplace support for lactation and obstetric needs. To tackle these issues, we are developing a coaching program that offers both one-on-one and group sessions led by trained physician coaches who understand the specific challenges of medical training. This coaching provides structured support to enhance resilience, self-efficacy, and well-being. Further, the program will reduce burnout and foster a stronger sense of community among trainee mothers. Ultimately, the goal is to create a scalable model that promotes gender equity and well-being across graduate medical education.

PIs: Erika Rangel, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Surgery; Kerri Palamara, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine

As racially minoritized surgical residents are often the "one and only" within their residency program, they often feel that they do not belong. This experience drives attrition from the field, which has a cascading impact on the sense of belonging for further minoritized residents, as well as health outcomes for racially minoritized patients. This project will match racially minoritized residents to a cohort of peers from other training programs, providing them with a platform for sharing experiences, emotional support, and advice. The program will also adapt a social belonging intervention from the field of social psychology that has been shown to durably improve academic and career outcomes. The long-term goal is to demonstrate that intervention will prove both effective and scalable, and, with expansion, will ultimately reduce educational and therefore health disparities in surgery.

PIs: Yue-Yung Hu, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Surgery, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital; Callisia Clarke, MD, Associate Professor of Surgery, Division Chief of Surgical Oncology, Medical College of Wisconsin

Medical education often prioritizes patient care, sometimes leading to the dehumanization of colleagues and a culture where it’s difficult to ask questions or learn. Under pressure, trainees may lack the tools to navigate interpersonal, professional and ethical challenges, which can impact both their well-being and patient care. This project transforms how medical trainees handle these challenges by using interactive theater and real-life scenarios to teach communication skills and identify systemic issues. Rather than blaming individuals, the approach fosters teamwork, creating safer, more supportive environments for providers and patients. The curriculum will be shared nationally, equipping programs with practical tools to improve medical training and workplace culture. Ultimately, the goal is to shift medical education toward a systems-based approach that promotes psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous learning.

PI: Sylvia Botros-Brey, MD, Professor, Departments of Urology and Medical Education

Physician burnout has evolved into a crisis, beginning in training and eroding both doctor well-being and patient safety. Better Together Physician Coaching (BT) is a 4-month, web-based program that, over the past 5 years, has helped thousands of residents and fellows normalize and manage stress, reclaim their confidence, and foster a sense of belonging in medicine. Through flexible, online physician coaching and community support, BT has been proven in several randomized clinical trials to reduce burnout, moral injury, impostor phenomenon and improve self-compassion and flourishing. This award will allow an expansion of the program with BT 2.0, a curriculum tailored for repeat participants, particularly those underrepresented in medicine, to build leadership skills, navigate bias, and advocate for themselves in a system that too often fails them. By embedding real-time, accessible coaching directly into the clinical learning environment, this curriculum will equip the next generation of physicians to lead change and create a stronger, more diverse medical workforce that thrives, rather than just survives, ensuring better care for all.

PI: Tyra Fainstad, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine

Despite ongoing efforts to improve clinical learning environments in graduate medical education, challenges such as a lack of belonging, values misalignment, and insufficient mentorship persist, particularly for trainees from historically underrepresented groups. The Brown Advocates for Social Change and Equity Mentorship Program at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University aims to address these challenges by creating a formal cohort of GME leaders and provide them with a year-long opportunity to learn about and apply mentorship frameworks, create and evaluate inclusive learning policies, and participate in a guided mentorship model that allows them to practice and refine these skills. The impact of the program will be measured by evaluating the faculty’s confidence in being able to apply best practices in mentorship individually, with mentees, and broadly, through policies. The program will also be evaluated from the mentee’s perspective and the outcomes shared with the broader GME community.

PIs: Patricia Poitevien, MD, MSc, Senior Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; Anne Vera Cruz, PhD, Assistant Dean for Curriculum on Diversity, Inclusive Teaching, and Learning

The intensive care unit is a high stress and high stakes learning environment. Here, doctors-in-training and advanced practice providers (nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants) all have to work together and coordinate their efforts seamlessly; however, they are rarely guided on how to work effectively together in teams. This project will develop and implement an educational and systems-based intervention to improve teamwork between residents, fellows, and advanced practice providers (APPs) in the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU). To nurture and promote an effective clinical learning environment, participants (residents, fellows and APPs) will reflect about personal biases toward interprofessional colleagues, define competencies related to effective teamwork, implement educational curricula to teach and assess teamwork, and determine the effectiveness of this model in achieving psychological safety. Ultimately, this project will illustrate that effective, high functioning, inclusive teamwork results in high quality education and interprofessional collaboration.

PIs: Alia Chisty, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Medicine; Paul Haidet, MD, MPH, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Humanities, and Public Health Sciences Director