Background: Medical residents may experience burnout during their training, and a lack of social support. This can impact their overall wellbeing and ability to master key professional competencies. We explored, in this study, the extent to which peer mentorship promotes psychosocial wellbeing and the development of professional competencies in medical residency education. Methods: We searched six databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Academic Research Complete, ERIC, Education Research Complete) for studies on peer mentoring relationships in medical residency. We selected any study where authors reported on outcomes associated with peer mentoring relationships among medical residents. We applied no date, language, or study design limits to this review. Results: We included nine studies in this systematic review. We found that medical residents received essential psychosocial supports from peers, and motivation to develop academic and career competencies. Medical residents in peer-mentoring relationships also reported increased overall satisfaction with their residency training programs. Conclusions: Peer-mentoring relationships can enhance the development of key professional competencies and coping mechanisms in medical residency education. Further rigorous research is needed to examine the comparative benefits of informal and formal peer mentoring, and identify best practices with respect to effective design of peer-mentorship programs.

BackgroundMany medical residents lack ready access to social and emotional supports that enable them to successfully cope with the challenges associated with medical residency. This absence of support has been shown to lead to high levels of burnout, decreased mental wellbeing, and difficulty mastering professional competencies in this population. While there is emerging evidence that peer mentoring can be an important source of psychosocial and career-related support for many individuals, the extent of the evidence regarding the benefits of peer mentorship in medical residency education has not yet been established. We describe a protocol for a systematic review to assess the effects of peer mentoring on medical residents’ mental wellbeing, social connectedness, and professional competencies.MethodsStudies included in this review will be those that report on peer-mentoring relationships among medical residents. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies will be eligible for inclusion. No date or language limits will be applied. We will search EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsychINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, Education Research Complete, and Academic Research Complete databases to identify relevant studies. Two authors will independently assess all abstracts and full-text studies for inclusion and study quality and extract study data in duplicate.DiscussionThis is the first systematic review to explicitly explore the role of peer mentoring in the context of medical residency education. We anticipate that the findings from this review will raise awareness of the benefits and challenges associated with peer-mentoring relationships, further the development and implementation of formal peer-mentoring programs for medical residents, and, through identifying gaps in the existing literature, inform future research efforts.Systematic review registrationThis protocol has not been registered in PROSPERO or any other publicly accessible registry.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13643-017-0571-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The purpose of our study was to examine how hacking – as discussed and displayed by participants of Monthly Music Hackathon NYC – could inform making music education practices more accessible and inclusive, if at all, for people with disabilities. Free and open to the public, Monthly Music Hackathon NYC hosts non-competitive community-based events in which participants – musicians, educators, coders, and software/hardware designers from beginner to expert – work on projects collaboratively over the course of a day to address real-world problems posed by stakeholders in their communities. Our research team consisting of the principal investigator and two research assistants attended and videorecorded the events of Monthly Music Hackathon NYC’s ‘Music AccessAbility’ hackathon. In this article, we detail what constitutes hacking at this event and how participants approached hacking disability. We discuss the potential of hacking in music education to create a more accessible and inclusive field, and the importance of championing a disability-led design model as the ethical way forward.

While cohesive teams are essential to advancing interdisciplinary research, few frameworks exist to guide team development. In this article, eight academic women adopt a participatory process of inter-relational reflexivity to reflect upon our interdisciplinary research and propose a best-practice framework for sustained effectiveness of interdisciplinary collaboration.

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