Dr. Jennifer Inbarasu, Dr. Shinnyi Chou, and Dr. Dana Raml played key roles in the creation of a poster discussing wellness. The poster took home first-place honors at ADMSEP.
Current UNMC psychiatry resident Dana Raml and former UNMC medical students, Dr. Shinnyi “Cindy” Chou, and Dr. Jennifer Inbarasu played a big role in creation of an award-winning poster.
The trio was part of a 13-person team that produced and presented a poster titled, “Medical Student Mental Health Wellness: Assessing Resources and Needs Across Five Medical Schools.” The poster earned first-place trainee poster at the ADMSEP Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.
“I believe that this poster represented an incredibly important shared goal of keeping our medical students healthy and safe,” said Dr. Inbarasu. “We were able to work together with many schools across the country to try and learn from each other what resources are available for their students with the future goal of finding ways to successfully promote the wellness of all medical students in the country.”
The poster looked at existing medical student mental health and wellness resources at five medical schools. Qualitative characteristics were then categorized based on distinguishing features and themes.
Major themes emerged after characterizing distinguishing features of wellness resources. These included professional service, peer support, self-help, peer groups, and Care during Transitions. The researchers concluded that with the demonstrable negative impacts of medical student burnout, implantations of wellness curricula is crucial. While many strategies have been proposed, research showed that optimization requires critical evaluation of existing programs and collaborative communication between institutions.
“I felt proud and honored to be a part of such a wonderful collaborative project,” said Dr. Inbarasu, who attended UNMC and now is a resident at the Mayo Clinical School of Graduate Medical Education.