Importance: Compromised well-being in health care workers (HCWs) is detrimental to the workforce, organizations, and patients.
Objective: To test the effectiveness of Well-Being Essentials for Learning Life-Balance (WELL-B), a web-based continuing education program to deliver brief, evidence-based, reflective, psychological interventions to improve 4 dimensions of HCW well-being (ie, emotional exhaustion, emotional thriving, emotional recovery, and work-life integration).
Design, Setting, And Participants: A randomized clinical trial (RCT) of US inpatient and outpatient HCWs randomized 1:1 was conducted from January 3 through May 31, 2023, using a web-based intervention.
Objective: Test sustainability of Web-based Implementation for the Science of Enhancing Resilience (WISER) intervention efficacy in reducing healthcare worker (HCW) emotional exhaustion (EE), a key component of burnout.
Design: One-year follow-up of WISER RCT using two cohorts (one waitlist control with shortened intervention period) of HCWs of four NICUs each, to improve HCW well-being (primary outcome: EE).
Results: In Cohorts 1 and 2, 194 and 312 WISER initiators were identified by 1-year, and 99 and 80 completed 1-year follow-up, respectively.
Objective: This qualitative study aimed to identify categories within therapeutic self-compassion letters written by healthcare workers. Resulting categories were assessed for their relevance to the construct of self-compassion.
Design: This was a qualitative descriptive study that used summative content analysis and inductive coding.
Objective: To compare the relative strengths (psychometric and convergent validity) of four emotional exhaustion (EE) measures: 9- and 5-item scales and two 1-item metrics.
Patients And Methods: This was a national cross-sectional survey study of 1409 US physicians in 2013. Psychometric properties were compared using Cronbach's alpha, Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Spearman's Correlations.
Little is known about the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in healthcare workers (HCWs). Past literature has shown that chronic strain caused by pandemics can adversely impact a variety of mental health outcomes in HCWs. There is growing recognition of the risk of stress and loss of resilience to HCWs during the COVID-19 pandemic, although the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in HCWs during the COVID-19 pandemic remains poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: To identify subgroups of nurses with distinct profiles of burnout (emotional exhaustion) and resilience (emotional thriving and emotional recovery) and describe nurse characteristics associated with each profile.
Design: Cross-sectional, correlational design.
Methods: Data were collected via electronic survey from 2018 to 2019.
Healthcare workers are experiencing high stress and burnout, at rates up to 70%, hindering patient care. Studies often focus on stressors in a particular setting or within the context of the pandemic which limits understanding of a more comprehensive view of stressors experienced by healthcare workers. The purpose of this study was to assess healthcare workers' self-reported major stressors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Engaged and accessible leadership is a key component of care excellence. However, the field lacks brief, reliable, and actionable measures of feedback and coaching-related behaviors of local leaders (for example, provides frequent feedback). The current study introduces a five-item Local Leadership (LL) scale by examining its psychometric properties, providing benchmarking across demographic factors and work settings, assessing its association with psychological safety, and testing whether LL predicts reports of restricted activities and absenteeism.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Leadership is a key driver of health care worker well-being and engagement, and feedback is an essential leadership behavior. Methods for evaluating interaction norms of local leaders are not well developed. Moreover, associations between local leadership and related domains are poorly understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Emotional exhaustion (EE) rates in healthcare workers (HCWs) have reached alarming levels and been linked to worse quality of care. Prior research has shown linguistic characteristics of writing samples can predict mental health disorders. Understanding whether linguistic characteristics are associated with EE could help identify and predict EE.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Problems with the wellbeing of healthcare workers (HCWs) are widespread and associated with detrimental consequences for the workforce, organizations, and patients.
Objective: This study tested the effectiveness of the Web-based Implementation for the Science of Enhancing Resilience (WISER) intervention, a positive psychology program, to improve six dimensions of the wellbeing of HCWs.
Design: We conducted a randomized controlled trial of HCWs between 1 April 2018 and 22 July 2019.
Importance: Extraordinary strain from COVID-19 has negatively impacted health care worker (HCW) well-being.
Objective: To determine whether HCW emotional exhaustion has increased during the pandemic, for which roles, and at what point.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This survey study was conducted in 3 waves, with an electronic survey administered in September 2019, September 2020, and September 2021 through January 2022.
Objectives: The current study aimed to guide the assessment and improvement of psychological safety (PS) by (1) examining the psychometric properties of a brief novel PS scale, (2) assessing relationships between PS and other safety culture domains, (3) exploring whether PS differs by healthcare worker demographic factors, and (4) exploring whether PS differs by participation in 2 institutional programs, which encourage PS and speaking-up with patient safety concerns (i.e., Safety WalkRounds and Positive Leadership WalkRounds).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Pathol Lab Med
September 2021
Context.—: Problems with health care worker (HCW) well-being have become a leading concern in medicine given their severity and robust links to outcomes like medical error, mortality, and turnover.
Objective.
Objective: Test web-based implementation for the science of enhancing resilience (WISER) intervention efficacy in reducing healthcare worker (HCW) burnout.
Design: RCT using two cohorts of HCWs of four NICUs each, to improve HCW well-being (primary outcome: burnout). Cohort 1 received WISER while Cohort 2 acted as a waitlist control.
Background: New technology adoption is common in health care, but it may elicit frustration if end users are not sufficiently considered in their design or trained in their use. These frustrations may contribute to burnout.
Objective: This study aimed to evaluate and quantify health care workers' frustration with technology and its relationship with emotional exhaustion, after controlling for measures of work-life integration that may indicate excessive job demands.
Importance: Poor work-life integration (WLI) occurs when career and personal responsibilities come in conflict and may contribute to the ongoing high rates of physician burnout. The characteristics associated with WLI are poorly understood.
Objective: To identify personal and professional factors associated with WLI in physicians and identify factors that modify the association between gender and WLI.
Engaging in well-being behaviors may promote resilience, which can protect against burnout. This descriptive, correlational analysis utilized baseline data from health care workers enrolled in the Web-based Implementation of the Science for Enhancing Resilience longitudinal study ( = 2,383). The study aimed to describe the association of (a) types of well-being behaviors (regular exercise, yoga, meditation, spent time with a close friend, vacation) and (b) total number of well-being behaviors with resilience (emotional thriving and emotional recovery), covarying for sociodemographic and professional characteristics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJt Comm J Qual Patient Saf
July 2021
Background: Interventions to decrease burnout and increase well-being in health care workers (HCWs) and improve organizational safety culture are urgently needed. This study was conducted to determine the association between Positive Leadership WalkRounds (PosWR), an organizational practice in which leaders conduct rounds and ask staff about what is going well, and HCW well-being and organizational safety culture.
Methods: This study was conducted in a large academic health care system in which senior leaders were encouraged to conduct PosWR.
Importance: Electronic health records (EHRs) are considered a potentially significant contributor to clinician burnout.
Objective: To describe the association of EHR usage, sex, and work culture with burnout for 3 types of clinicians at an academic medical institution.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This cross-sectional study of 1310 clinicians at a large tertiary care academic medical center analyzed EHR usage metrics for the month of April 2019 with results from a well-being survey from May 2019.
Objective: To assess maternal and neonatal healthcare workers (HCWs) perspectives on well-being and patient safety amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Study Design: Anonymous survey of HCW well-being, burnout, and patient safety over the prior conducted in June 2020. Results were analyzed by job position and burnout status.
Objective: This study was performed to determine whether health care worker (HCW) assessments of good institutional support for second victims were associated with institutional safety culture and workforce well-being.
Methods: HCWs' awareness of work colleagues emotionally traumatized by an unanticipated clinical event (second victims), their perceptions of level of institutional support for such colleagues, safety culture, and workforce well-being were assessed using a cross-sectional survey (SCORE [Safety, Communication, Operational Reliability, and Engagement] survey). Safety culture scores and workforce well-being scores were compared across work settings with high (top quartile) and low (bottom quartile) perceptions of second victim support.
Background: Emotional exhaustion (EE) in health care workers is common and consequentially linked to lower quality of care. Effective interventions to address EE are urgently needed.
Objective: This randomized single-exposure trial examined the efficacy of a gratitude letter-writing intervention for improving health care workers' well-being.
In the United States, hospitals must meet eligibility criteria to receive federal funding. Regulatory bodies, such as the Joint Commission, are approved by the government to give, or withhold, accreditation to hospitals. This accreditation is a requisite to continue receiving funding.
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