Exploring access to support services for medical students: recommendations for enhancing wellbeing support

Background: Medical students have reported facing unique challenges in their academic journey that can have a significant impact on their mental health and wellbeing; therefore, their access to support services and wellbeing resources has been deemed crucial for dealing effectively with the various challenges they tend to face. While previous research has highlighted certain barriers affecting medical students' help-seeking and access to wellbeing support more generally, there is a pressing need for more in-depth research into the factors that may hinder or facilitate medical students' acceptability and uptake of the wellbeing resources available to them within institutional contexts. The current study aims to explore students' perceptions and utilization of wellbeing interventions and welfare resources within a medical school setting, as well as the factors influencing their help-seeking attitudes or behaviours. Additionally, it seeks to instigate medical students' deeper reflections on potential enhancements that could be applied to wellbeing resources so that they are better suited to address their needs.

Methods: This study employed a qualitative design, involving semi-structured interviews and a series of focus groups with medical students at the University of Nottingham (UK). Post-interview, focus groups were deemed necessary to gain deeper insights into emerging findings from the interviews regarding students' views on wellbeing support services. Qualitative data from the interviews was subjected to thematic analysis while a hybrid thematic analytic approach was applied for the focus group data in order to allow for both pre-defined themes from the interviews and newly emerging patterns to be identified and analysed in a combined manner.

Results: Twenty-five participants took part in the semi-structured interviews and twenty-two participants were recruited in a total of seven focus groups. Thematic analysis findings identified several key barriers to medical students' accessing wellbeing resources, including difficulties in finding relevant information, lengthy processes and difficulties receiving prompt help in urgent situations, learning environment issues, confidentiality concerns, and stigma around mental health. Student suggestions for the enhancement of wellbeing provision were centered around proposed improvements in the format that the relevant information was presented and in the structure underlying the delivery of support services.

Conclusion: The study findings shed light on multi-faceted factors contributing to medical students' challenges in accessing support services; and provided a deeper understanding of medical students' wellbeing needs through a consolidation of their recommendations for the implementation of practical steps to address these needs. These steps can potentially inform key medical education stakeholders so that they can actively and proactively foster more supportive environments that may help improve medical students' help-seeking, as well as their acceptability and uptake of wellbeing services.