Why is it called Lift?
We are a positive, optimistic organization that emphasizes health and potential. We feature solutions that lift up and empower health care providers and students, building upon their existing strengths, talents, and experience to help reduce symptoms of what has been called “burnout,” such as despair, depersonalization, career regret, or depression. However, rather than emphasizing the symptoms and external stresses potentially out of one’s control, we focus on factors that can be controlled. Chief among these are peers supporting each other, teamwork, anticipatory guidance regarding the medical school experience, and self-care.
We can all start with who we are, build upon that, and lift ourselves, our colleagues, and the healthcare profession up.
Funding
Lift was developed by Clinical Tools, Inc (CTI) with funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (Grant #’s 1 R43 AA026474-01 and #2R44AA026474, IRB Approval 2019/002). We gratefully acknowledge this support, which was the sole funding source for this project’s development.
No Industry Support
All materials on this website were developed in an industry-fund-free environment. No industry funding was used to create this website or the simulation experience.
Purpose
Medical students have a significant level of symptoms of distress and may sometimes turn to relatively less healthy coping skills. While there are supports available through the students’ medical schools for distress they experience, distressful symptoms continue to be a problem. Lift aims to improve those symptoms via simulations, cases, and information designed to raise awareness of the positive impact of peer support, help develop compassionate communication skills for more effective peer support, and emphasize a reliance on healthy coping skills. The combined intervention is a scalable, reproducible, comprehensive, standardized solution.
Impact
Our unique immersive role-playing simulation follows evidence-based interventions delivered in an engaging narrative, and an attractive environment to provide:
- peer support skills
- an experience tailored to the general and specific needs and capability of the future or current medical student,
- choice, exploration, challenge, reflection, curated resources, insights, and intrinsic motivation,
- decision-making opportunities (quick, medium, and slow) with clear consequences,
- an opportunity to learn from simulated outcomes plus tailored feedback and positive rewards
To deepen understanding, medical students explore and navigate a clinical learning environment to identify factors and strategies relevant to common challenges medical students encounter. Exploration puts the user in control of the Lift experience and leads to increased learning and understanding. Control, self-expression, and creativity support a focus on intrinsic motivation. In our role-playing narrative, the medical student navigates spaces including clinical settings. The experience components (challenges, simulated peers, realistic responses to choices made, feedback, and development) mirror elements of an entertainment-focused game. Users struggle with and conquer challenges, make choices, learn from the outcome of choices, receive feedback from a simulated mentor, and master skills.
As users progress through the simulated clinical training experience, they identify causes of success and frustration (e.g., challenges, ethical dilemmas, demands, poor work-life balance, negative feedback from supervisors) and experience the impact of optimal choices. Lift enhances longer-term decisions, required for behavioral change by helping medical students:
- identify attitudes and perspectives that impact poor choices (e.g., unrealistic expectations),
- prioritize activities that establish balance (leaving aside time for rewarding aspects of life),
- examine decisions and their impact (e.g, using substances to cope with stress)
Future Plans
We recently completed the final evaluation of our Lift interventions consisting of simulated experiences, cases, and other online materials to help medical students improve their skills to overcome and address sources of distress.
We envision that Lift will be sold to groups such as groups supporting pre-med students in making an informed career choice, student health and wellness centers for medical schools, and providing a digital support tool for individual medical students entering and continuing their medical school education.
Dissemination
Clinical Tools, and its gaming division Health Impact Studio, strives to share knowledge gained through the testing and use of its products. You can see our latest conference presentations, as well as our published research articles, at the Health Impact Studio site.
