Exploring Factors That Influence the Professional Identity Formation, Self-Regulation, Resilience of Pediatricians and Their Challenges

BackgroundThe professional development of pediatricians, clinical work always has to face the high pressure of family members, diversity and uncertainty that children will not express. Concerned problems encountered by worldwide are facing high pressures of disease change, fatigue of dealing with family members' nervous. The other was different professionals’ competitions such as family medicine, otolaryngology for washing throat and suction nasal obstruction. Shortage of manpower for being requested the same services as doing in the adult medicine, such as emergent endoscopy and ultrasound. Overcrowding Pediatric emergency has stress with family’s speech or physical violence. These dilemmas also challenge Pediatric physicians in Taiwan. The Pediatric residents immerse themselves in this highly stressed workplace full of uncertainty and diversity for 3 years to achieve their profession and 5 years for subspecialty. Why some pediatricians are willing to stay in the medical center or some choose to go to the basic clinic service? How to build a resilient workforce in Pediatric residents? Resilience is important to respond the stress in a healthy way with “bouncing back” after challenges. In this identity process is emerging as a valuable way to underpin positive coping strategies for professional practice in our learning. However, an identity process is a continuously self-adjusting and self-regulation with individuals behavior to keep our reflected congruent with our identity standards. Self-regulation can improve psychomotor skills and it is considered a way to reflect self-appraisal and self-reaction. This gives importance to cognitively based promoters in the professional identity. To our knowledge, there has been no research has examined these issues in the Taiwan Pediatrics.Study ObjectivesThe plan hopes to understand the reasons for the professional identity of pediatricians, and find effective ways to promote the resilience of pediatricians through interviews and analysis. Whether having the strong sense of Pediatrician professional identity is an important way to protect pediatric residents and physicians from feeling overwhelmed. Whether the intervention designed based on our research will facilitate the enhancement of pediatric residents, physicians’ wellbeing and our patients’ safety. MethodsThe mixed methods will be used in this study. First, we use Q method to investigate how pediatric residents and physicians understand their own professional identities and what are the key factors that are important to them with experience in the first year. Secondary, we continue to develop a validated scale (Pediatrician professional identity scale, PedPIS) to examine pediatric residents’ and physicians’ professional identities factors related to reduced stress and burnout via focus group in the second year. Finally we design interventions (e.g. resilience training, identity facilitation or self-regulation teaching, et al.) based upon the factors in the first two years we identified and further evaluate the effectiveness of these intervention in the third year.

Project ID:PF10907-1687
External Project ID:MOST109-2511-H182-010