Resilience, psychological well-being, and coping strategies in medical students

Abstract

Introduction: The period of transition from school to medical education is critical and students faced many challenges and have a stressful life. Coping and resilience level of a student determine psychological well-being for higher professional competence and learning. The study aims to determine impacts of coping, and resilience on psychological well-being among medical students. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive survey was conducted by randomly enrolling 151 MBBS students at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, Uttarakhand. The information on personal and professional domains, coping, resilience and psychological well-being was sought by using sociodemographic profile sheet, resiliency scale for adult, BREF-COPE (Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced), and Ryff's psychological well-being scale. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics was applied to formulate results. Results: Resilience did not show significant relationship with psychological well-being in medical students. However, it was found that high level of resilience enables to predict more autonomy (P < 0.05), personal growth (P < 0.05), help in findings meaning in life (P < 0.05) and develop strong structural aspects (P < 0.05) in physical structure. Further, higher resilience enables to more use of self-distraction (P < 0.05). Likewise, it was also evident that better level of psychological well-being enables students to use more active coping (P < 0.05), positive reframing (P < 0.05), and acceptance coping strategies (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Higher level of resilience will help the medical graduates to buffer day to day stressors and enalbles to use more positive coping strategies. Discussion and Recommendation: Improvement in social and personal life of the health sciences students should be kept in mind along with clinical competency. Development of resilience to tolerate day to day life hassles is a healthy practice to have a positive augmentation of psychological well-being. The study recommended to implicit educational training centered on resilience and positive coping strategies in future.