Investigating graduates’ perception of overall goal attainment of a resilience-focused medical program offered in the United Arab Emirates: a quantitative cross-sectional study, 2025

Abstract

It is vital to develop transversal skills that collectively reinforce individual learners’ resilience. Although resilience-focused initiatives are widely adopted in health and care professions’ education, these initiatives seem to take the form of discrete interventions, as opposed to a longitudinal and integrated focus throughout respective programs. To investigate graduates’ perceptions of the overall goal attainment of an innovatively resilience-focused, outcomes-based medical program offered through an academic health system in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. A quantitative cross-sectional research design was used. Graduates of the first three cohorts of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery of Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences – Dubai Health were invited to a survey (throughout October 2025). Analysis of scales included computing overall extent of agreement score for each of four scales. Out of 122 graduates, 76 responded. Percentage of total average of agreement that ‘Program Enables Attainment of Program Learning Outcomes’ was 87.11% and that ‘Program Enables Attainment of Program Objective’ was 85.14%. Also, percentage of total average of agreement that ‘Program Enables Building of Personal Resilience’ was 73.55% and that ‘Self-regulated Learning Enables Attainment of Goals’ was 80.76%. Graduates reported high levels of agreement that the program enabled attainment of its learning outcomes and overall objective, and agreed that it contributed to building their personal resilience. Agreement was lower for the decompression facet of resilience than for activation. As perceptions reported at a single point in time, these findings cannot establish program effectiveness. They suggest that medical programs reinforcing learners’ resilience in an integrated manner may benefit from attending explicitly to rest and recovery, and that perceived goal attainment is worth evaluating systematically from the graduates’ perspective.