Meadville Medical Center Family Medicine Residency – March 4, 2020

Meadville Medical Center Family Medicine Residency’s Resident Retreat: Winter Blues Buster 

- Breakfast at the Market House Grille, Meadville, PA
- Ascend rock wall climbing, Pittsburgh, PA
- Lunch at The Colombian Spot, Carson St., Pittsburgh, PA

Results/Outcome Survey
What was the general understanding of the purpose of the project/program by participants?

  • a day away from the routine activities/stressors of residency spent with fellow residents
  • enjoyable team-building activity
  • a chance to relax with everyone in the program in a non-hospital environment

During the project/program, what tangible tools or strategies were demonstrated or taught (i.e,
coping skills for wellness and life balance?)

  • stepping outside personal comfort zone (for example, two residents stated that they feared heights)
  • stopping the merry-go-round of life in residency (in medicine) to consciously do something different

What word(s) best describes how you feel when you are experiencing stress or well-being
imbalance?

  • “emptying the junk drawer onto a trampoline” – read it on Facebook!
  • exhaustion
  • hopeless feeling that nothing will ever get better
  • nothing left

What suggestions do you have to increase the probability of success for the project/program for
other institutions?

  • encourage administration to publicize the residents’ efforts to promote work/life balance
  • encourage POMA to continue to provide these generous grants!
  • encourage residency directors to remind their residents that these programs are out there and to take advantage of them

What do you intend to do, upon returning to work, that you learned and practiced during the
activity, that will improve your response to stressful situations?

  • remember to cheer for each other!
  • remember that everyone feels stress, it’s normal in medicine, but it can’t rule your conscious thought
  • stress is inevitable, and it can motivate us

 Meadville Wellness Rock climbing