With the increasing number of medical students diagnosed with adult ADHD, residency programs face an imperative task to handle accommodations effectively. As medical residents occupy unique roles as learners and employees, defining a clear process to protect residents and programs can be challenging. This article will review legal requirements, disclosure processes, and sample accommodations that can help family medicine programs make sense of their responsibilities and support residents. Collaboration, clear boundaries, and effective documentation increase the likelihood of a predictable process to facilitate inclusion of learners with ADHD into graduate medical education and residency.

Background and Objectives: Although burnout in medicine—particularly medical education—represents an ongoing problem, relatively few studies have established longitudinal connections between burnout and risk factors. Establishment of specific causal links and risk factors will determine important curriculum changes to reduce the risk of burnout in medical learners. Our study aimed to explore links between emotion regulation skill (strategies individuals use to regulate emotional experiences and responses to stress) and vulnerability to burnout using a longitudinal design in one family medicine residency program. Methods: Family medicine residents completed the Difficulties with Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) at the beginning of each year (July/August). The residency program collected data over the course of 5 years. All residents consented to participate. We used linear regression analyses to examine postgraduate year-1 DERS scores as a predictor of postgraduate year-2 burnout and postgraduate year-3 burnout. Results: In this sample of residents, higher scores on the DERS at the first year of residency predicted personal and work-related burnout on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) at the beginning of the second and third years. Conclusions: Difficulties with emotion regulation predicted personal burnout in this small sample. This finding dovetails with cross-sectional data in the literature. Although further mechanisms contributing to burnout should be explored, this finding suggests that direct instruction in adaptive emotion regulation strategies delivered early in medical education could provide significant downstream benefits for family medicine residents.

Objective Burnout during residency education is a phenomenon which requires careful study. A single item for measuring burnout shows promise for its brevity and concordance with the most commonly used measure of burnout, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, but has not been compared to the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. We compared the single-item measure of burnout question to the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory to assess the convergence between these two measures of burnout. Method Family Medicine residents (n = 32) from three residency programs completed the single-item measure of burnout question and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. We compared the single-item measure of burnout measure to the three scales of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. Results Our analyses indicated that the single item measure is highly correlated with personal burnout (r = .76), moderately correlated with patient burnout (r = .58), and not correlated with work burnout (r = .18). Conclusions Because the single-item measure of burnout is particularly useful for identifying personal burnout, it should be useful for identifying early signs of burnout amount physicians in training.