Poster 43 – The Fortify Resilience Initiative

The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) School of Medicine (SOM) Office of Graduate Medical Education (GME) was recently awarded a federally funded grant by Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) for the Fortify Resilience Initiative, to build and sustain a culture of wellbeing for Residents and Fellows (R/Fs) across nineteen (19) UTRGV GME residency and fellowship programs. The initiative includes three key drivers – Access Strategies, Empowerment Initiatives, and System Redesign – which are powered by partnerships within and external to the institution to permanently impact UTRGV’s capacity to maintain and promote wellbeing. A partnership with Tend Health (TH), consultant partners with specialized expertise in mitigating burnout and increasing resilience for R/Fs, will power the Access Strategies by providing: 1) direct clinical/ coaching services; 2) evidence-based wellness curricula for all R/Fs through monthly live-online-learning sessions; and 3) yearly opt-out wellness checks for all R/Fs. Empowerment Initiatives champion the idea that resilience is an ongoing set of skills maintained over time, and that wellbeing is best addressed at individual and program levels to be successful. Data driven self-management at the individual and program level will be powered by: 1) completion and launch of an existing Wellness Mobile Application (WMA) prototype 2) dissemination of a developed Wellbeing Champion Toolkit (WCT) to each UTRGV GME program. Lastly, in partnership with TH, a System Redesign process will be completed via 21 leadership consultations followed by recommendations for systematic change. This will be supplemented by the development of a Master Trainer Faculty Development (MTFD) track to graduate 20 GME faculty members with competency to internally deliver evidence-based resiliency curricula. By year 2024, the Fortify Resilience initiative will impact 249+ UTRGV R/Fs, along with training 20 faculty members as demonstrated by: graduating all R/Fs with self-management of well-being competencies, establishing access strategy services as routine part of UTRGV GME programs, integrating technology solutions – WMA – as core strategy for resilience for GME programs, enrolling 100% of new R/Fs as users on WMA via GME onboarding each program year, sustaining Wellness Committees across 19+ GME programs with routine use of WMA reports, establishing a scalable culture of wellbeing strategy for the UTRGV SOM, build resilience supporting policies within programs and institution, developing a UTRGV Faculty Affairs sustained MTFD track to continue delivery of resilience trainings by MTFD scholars