Factors influencing the resilience of clinical education in general medicine in Iran: a qualitative content analysis study

BackgroundClinical education is one of the key components of medical education and directly affects the efficiency, professional skills, and quality of future services graduates provide. Additionally, resilience plays an essential role in facing crises and forming medical students' professional identity. Strengthening resilience can accelerate this process. Therefore, this study was conducted to comprehensively understand the dimensions and factors affecting resilience in the clinical education of general medicine, based on the experiences of stakeholders, including professors and students present in clinical environments.MethodologyThis qualitative study was conducted based on purposive sampling among ten faculty members and six medical students. The data collection process was conducted from September 2023 to April 2024 through semi-structured interviews. Interviews were transcribed, and data analysis was accomplished according to the steps proposed by Graneheim and Lundman (2004).ResultsData analysis revealed three themes that reflected the factors influencing resilience in clinical education: Facilitators of resilient clinical education, Barriers of resilient clinical education, and Prerequisite factors of resilient clinical education.ConclusionAccording to the results, in order to create a resilient clinical education system, it is necessary to pay attention to factors such as the use of residents in teaching, cooperative learning, effective interaction, strong knowledge base, infrastructure development, and spreading the culture of learning from experiences. In the meantime, obstacles such as the loss of trust between community members and doctors, heavy workload, non-scientific management and treatment-oriented clinical training centers can prevent the realization of this goal. On the other hand, supporting faculty members with training programs and job promotion as well as paying attention to individual resilience are considered as facilitating factors in this direction.