(1107) An Assessment of Emotional Elasticity in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellows

Introduction: Emotional elasticity is the ability of a physician to encounter difficult emotional situations, respond, and continue onward in medical practice. Pediatric critical care medicine (PCCM) fellows are faced with unique emotional challenges when caring for critically ill and dying children. Over the course of training, fellows must develop emotional elasticity to protect their mental health. We sought to understand the emotional elasticity of PCCM fellows as well as their training on the subject.

Methods: An anonymous, online Qualtrics survey was sent to the program directors of all 77 PCCM fellowships during the 2023-2024 academic year and distributed to fellows via email. Of approximately 630 fellows, 87 participated.

Results: Of the survey respondents, 29 were first year fellows, 27 second year, 27 third year and 4 were fourth or atypical year. When asked how often they experienced difficult situations which elicit emotional reaction, 30.6% of participants reported “daily” and 48.2% reported “weekly.” When asked if they had ever received any formal training on emotional elasticity, 19.8% reported “no training,” 34.1% reported “lectures,” 30.2% reported “small group discussions." When asked how prepared they felt to process difficult patient situations, only 49.4% felt “prepared,” 28.9% felt “neutral” and 12% felt “unprepared.” When asked how useful a formal emotional elasticity training curriculum would be, 38.8% responded “moderately useful,” 20% “very useful” and 15% “extremely useful.” Only 5% of participants felt it would be “not useful at all.” Participants expressed interest in debrief sessions, peer support groups and mentorship as emotional elasticity training.

Conclusions: One of the hidden core competencies of PCCM fellowship is the learned ability to manage difficult emotional events while caring for critically ill children and continue onward with the high demands of intensivist practice. Emotional distress is not unique to critical care medicine, however it may be more present with less time to recover from emotional events as compared to other areas of medicine. While emotional elasticity is a skill, our findings suggest that some fellows receive no formal training on the subject, and most fellows feel that formal training would be useful in becoming a well-rounded intensivist.