Humanities in Full Retreat

Background: Professionalism is a crucial component that sustains the status and practice of clinical medicine. Description: At the Penn State College of Medicine, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, the Department of Humanities has developed a cross-disciplinary, annual retreat for resident leaders to help them reflect on the nature of professionalism and on what it means to be a role model. The retreat also provides resident leaders the opportunity to discuss common challenges such as dealing with the stress of residency, giving bad news, working with "difficult" patients, dealing with one's mistakes, and finding meaning and purpose in medicine. Evaluation: The retreat is evaluated by resident participants using a Likert scale and open-ended responses and has received consistently excellent evaluations. Conclusion: We have developed an effective, consistently successful retreat for providing residents across the spectrum of medical training with an enriching humanities experience. Such a retreat could be easily exported to other institutions to promote professionalism during residency.