MGH Internal Medicine Professional Development Coaching Program

Pictured above (l to r) are a few of the participants in the MGH Coaching Program: Rebecca Berger, MD, current resident and future faculty; Kerri Palamara McGrath, MD, MGH Internal Medicine Associate Program Director and director of the coaching program; Mira Kautzky, MD, faculty; Benjamin Bearnot, MD, current resident and future faculty; and Gina Nigro, coaching program administrator

The MGH Internal Medicine Professional Development Coaching Program is designed to provide emotional and professional support to residents during one of the most challenging periods of their lives. The first such program in the nation, it matches residents with non-supervisory faculty who, using the principles of positive psychology, help the residents reflect on their experiences, develop an understanding of their strengths, and use those strengths to help them reach their potential.

Each trained volunteer faculty member coaches two to three residents and remains their coach for their entire residency. All residents are included in the coaching program. Interns and faculty meet quarterly, usually for an hour each quarter. There is a recommended curriculum for the meetings based on the principles of positive psychology, but either party can change the curriculum to address the resident’s current needs.  This curriculum was designed in collaboration with Carol Kauffman, PhD from the McLean Institute of Coaching. At the first meeting, the coach explains their role and invites the resident to talk about positive experiences from their residency and what they hope to experience in the near future. By the third meeting, residents are asked to identify an upcoming challenge or goal and to develop a strategy, utilizing their strengths, to meet that challenge or goal.

The second year focuses on building leadership techniques and the third year on making sure that the leadership style is authentic to the resident. Some second and third-year residents who know what they want from a coach meet with their coaches on a flexible, as-needed, schedule. Over time, coaches and residents develop a bond that the residents come to rely on for support.

For Jenna McNeill, MD, a resident since June 2014, the coaching program was one of the reasons she was attracted to MGH for her residency. She was in a leadership program during her medical training at Duke and finds the coaching program provides many of the same benefits. She loves the program and  noted, “It’s nice to have someone to check in with.”

Christopher Chen, MD, in his second year of the residency, agreed, “I love the coaching program; it is part of the heart of the internal medicine residency. It grants us a chance to reflect on the unique joys and struggles of medical training with senior physicians, who can use their own experiences to help navigate us through those waters.

Jonathan Wing, MD, similarly, described the program as a “great experience.” Dr. Wing, who worked as a teacher before becoming a medical student noted that “reflection is a hard thing” and not everyone is open to it. He described his coach as a “great sounding board” and noted that although there are a lot of different types of support in place for residents who struggle a little in obvious ways, the coaching program helps the residents who may struggle in non-obvious ways or who don’t struggle but still may not meet their potential without the coaching effort. As Dr. Wing noted, most residents, no matter how accomplished they are, have insecurities. The coaching program offers an opportunity to deal with their insecurities in a supportive environment. It helps residents identify what they are doing well, why they do well at it and apply that self-knowledge to improve in the areas they are working on. Upon graduation, in June 2016, he will become a faculty member at MGH and will participate in the coaching program as a coach.

Although not designed to focus on residents who are struggling, the program has been an early detector of residents who may need additional help acclimating to their new role and responsibilities. Recently published research (http://www.jgme.org/doi/abs/10.4300/JGME-D-14-00791.1?code=gmed-site) in collaboration with Karen Donelan, ScD, EdM, from the Mongan Institute of Health Policy at MGH shows that it reduces burnout among residents. Additional research, not yet published, indicates that the longer a person is in the coaching program, the lower his or her burnout.

Now, approaching its fifth year, the program has not only positively impacted the lives of a generation of internal medicine residents, but has greatly influenced their coaches.
Dr. Palamara McGrath, MD, the Coaching Program Director and, herself, a coach, believes her training and experience as a coach has improved her mental health and work-life balance. She gets great enjoyment from connecting with her coachees and getting to know them as people, not just as residents. In addition, it has made her a better public speaker, changed her work view, affected her career path, and given her a national voice about coaching. She travels the country to teaching hospitals and conferences presenting information on the program. As Dr. Palamara McGrath and other coaches have noted, once they learned about coaching through positive psychology, they started using it everywhere – with patients, residents, colleagues and family members.

Mira Kautzky, MD, another faculty member and coach noted that the coaching program has “helped me in my precepting because I have a much better sense of how the residency program works and the stresses and experiences of the residents when they’re not in clinic with me. It’s helped me also understand what kind of feedback is useful and memorable to our residents; hopefully that translates into giving more constructive feedback myself.” She also mentioned that the techniques she has learned through the program have helped her “in listening to family members, patients, friends who are in need of direction or help sorting out an issue”.

A few residents go into the Coaching Program somewhat reluctantly. These are the residents about whom the coaches most worry. To ensure that residents are well-matched to their coaches, Dr. Palamara McGrath and Gina Nigro, Primary Care and Coaching Program Manager, ask residents to complete forms indicating their preferences in a coach and if a resident ever indicates the desire to change coaches, Dr. Palamara McGrath always finds another coach to work with the resident. At the end of the year, the program collects feedback from the residents and a coaches’ retreat is held to provide additional training. This year, for the first-time, there will be feedback from enough residents to give each coach de-identified individualized feedback.

Coaching is spreading within the institution - Dr. Palamara McGrath has helped the MGH Anesthesiology Residency program start a coaching program.  The Division of General and Internal Medicine at MGH is applying the lessons learned in the resident coaching program to a new coaching program for teaching faculty with less than 2 years of experience. 

Because of the success of the program and the department’s commitment to do what is best for the residents, supplemental materials have been made available to any program in the country. There are fifteen other programs around the country that are starting or have started coaching programs based on MGH Internal Medicine’s model and by a year from now, Dr. Palamara McGrath hopes that number will have more than doubled.

This page was created on 5/27/16 and updated on 1/24/18.