Graduates Rate Resilience-Focused Dubai Medical Program Highly, but Flag Recovery Gaps

Graduates of an unusually resilience-focused medical degree in Dubai have given their program strong marks, according to a new cross-sectional survey published in BMC Medical Education. Of the 122 eligible graduates, 76 responded. The survey asked how far they agreed that the program had enabled them to reach its stated learning outcomes, its overall objective, and its distinctive goal of building personal resilience during the demanding years of medical training.

The results were largely affirmative. Averaged across the relevant survey items, 87.11 percent of total average agreement responses indicated that the program enabled attainment of its program learning outcomes, and 85.14 percent indicated that it enabled attainment of the overall program objective. Agreement that self-regulated learning enabled attainment of goals reached 80.76 percent.

These figures suggest that, from the graduates' own perspective, the outcomes-based curriculum delivered what it promised: a structured set of competencies tied explicitly to program-level goals rather than to isolated courses. The resilience findings were more nuanced. Overall agreement that the program enabled the building of personal resilience stood at 73.55 percent, the lowest of the four measured scales.

Within that scale, the study distinguished between facets of resilience, and graduates reported notably lower agreement for the decompression facet, which concerns rest and recovery, than for the activation facet, which concerns mobilizing coping resources under pressure. The authors interpret this pattern as a signal that resilience-oriented medical programs, even when integrated longitudinally across a curriculum rather than offered as discrete workshops, may still under-serve the recovery side of the resilience equation. In other words, students may be well trained to activate adaptive responses to stress but feel less supported in deliberately stepping back, resting, and recharging.

The Dubai program was designed around transversal skills that collectively reinforce individual learners' resilience, an approach the authors describe as vital in health and care professions' education. They note in the background of the study that although resilience-focused initiatives are widely adopted across medical education, these initiatives tend to take the form of discrete interventions rather than a longitudinal and integrated focus throughout a program. The Mohammed Bin Rashid University curriculum, embedded within an academic health system, was constructed to test the integrated alternative, making the graduates' perceptions a useful early data point on how such a design is received by those who complete it.

The study's limitations are clearly stated and matter for how the findings should be read. Perceptions were captured at a single point in time, so the cross-sectional design cannot establish that the program caused the outcomes graduates reported, let alone demonstrate program effectiveness against external benchmarks. The authors therefore frame their conclusions carefully: the findings 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 as one complementary lens on program quality.

Subject of Research: Graduates' perceptions of goal attainment in a resilience-focused medical program in the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: 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

Article References: Otaki, F., Czabanowska, K., Clemens, T., Preez, L. D., Alsuwaidi, L., Buhlman, N., Mylod, D. E., Loney, T., & Paulus, A. (2026). 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. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10275-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10275-x

Keywords: medical education, resilience, cross-sectional study, United Arab Emirates, MBBS graduates, program evaluation, self-regulated learning, curriculum design, Dubai, BMC Medical Education, decompression, outcomes-based education