Is resilience a trainable skill?

The General Medical Council views resilience as a critical part of becoming a professional. All graduating medical students should have proved that they are resilient, and NHS job specifications expect it. They define resilience as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.” It implies toughness and an untiring effort to do more, to work faster, and to be better. The Medical Schools Council suggests screening for resilience in interviews, and medical students now get formal resilience training as part of the curriculum. The GMC’s Professional Behaviour and Fitness to Practise guidance underlines the importance of emotional resilience, which it defines as an “ability to adapt and be resourceful, mindful, and effective in complex, uncertain, or stressful situations.”

This sounds impressive, but is resilience a trainable skill? Confusingly, it’s also presented as an intrinsic part of any good doctor’s personality. Can you detect resilience, let alone teach it? And does increasing the resilience of individual doctors—if that’s possible—improve patient care?

We were among the first medical students to receive mandatory resilience training as part of our degree. Theories about resilience seeped into many aspects of our education, particularly the GMC mandated Situational Judgement Test (SJT), an exam that uses realistic clinical and …