Feasibility of integrating the VIA survey into medical education: a strengths workshop and longitudinal mentoring curriculum

Medical students experience high rates of stress and burnout, which negatively impact mental health and academic performance. Traditional resilience interventions often emphasize stress management and coping skills without explicitly focusing on the identification and use of personal strengths. The Values in Action (VIA) Inventory of Strengths offers a positive psychology–based framework for recognizing character strengths associated with well-being and resilience. This study describes and evaluates a VIA Strengths Workshop integrated into a pre-clinical curriculum at a single institution. Because strengths-based interventions are intended to support learner well-being, exploratory analyses also examined validated burnout and resilience measures collected during the same period. Incoming first-year medical students completed the VIA Top 5 Strengths questionnaire prior to orientation and received individualized reports. A 90-minute psychiatrist-facilitated workshop introduced the VIA framework and guided small-group discussions within longitudinal LIFE-community mentoring groups, focusing on reflecting on and applying identified strengths. Longitudinal reinforcement included a structured online discussion board at two months and individual coaching meetings with faculty mentors. At the end of first year (2023), 161 of 186 students completed the survey (response rate 86.6%), and at the end of second year (2024), 138 of 171 students completed the survey (response rate 80.7%). All respondents with complete Likert-scale data were included in quantitative analyses. Students rated the extent to which they lived in alignment with their VIA Top 5 strengths and responded to two open-ended questions about obstacles and contributors to wholeness. As an exploratory secondary analysis, routinely collected institutional well-being data, including the validated single-item burnout measure derived from the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), were compared between the intervention cohort and the immediately preceding class. At the end of first year, most students reported at least moderate alignment between their actions and their strengths (mean 3.58, SD = 0.79). Similar findings were observed at the end of second year (mean 3.42, SD = 0.92), and paired analysis of students with linkable responses demonstrated no statistically significant change in strengths alignment over time (Wilcoxon signed-rank p = .581). In exploratory cohort comparisons, the intervention cohort reported higher one-item burnout scores than the prior non-intervention cohort (mean 2.52 vs. 1.85; Mann-Whitney U p < .001). BRS scores were modestly higher in the intervention cohort (mean 3.57 vs. 3.44; Welch p = .060), with fewer students classified as having low resilience (10.8% vs. 18.0%), although these differences did not reach conventional statistical significance. A VIA-based strengths workshop, supported by longitudinal peer and faculty mentoring, was associated with moderate and relatively stable self-reported alignment with character strengths throughout the pre-clinical curriculum. Exploratory analyses demonstrated that burnout, resilience, and strengths alignment represent complementary dimensions of learner well-being and may not change in parallel. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating multiple validated well-being measures when evaluating strengths-based educational interventions.