Burnout is a major issue among healthcare professionals even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Healthcare professionals know this is a problem but what interventions are being studied to help. I give a snapshot of some studies out there right now that are showing promising results for preventing and healing burnout.
Burnout is a major issue among healthcare professionals even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Healthcare professionals know this is a problem but what interventions are being studied to help. I give a snapshot of some studies out there right now that are showing promising results for preventing and healing burnout.
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Welcome to the OT digest podcast. I'm your host, Katie Caspero, the founder of OT, graphically.com where I synthesize research into visually appealing. On this podcast, we take research and make it more fun and interesting in order to quickly hear the most updated evidence all around the world. I interview authors, share research tips and provide practical examples that I hope we can use and incorporate into your interventions the very next day.
Thanks for listening.
Welcome everyone to the OT digest, podcast. I'm your host, Katie Caspero. And today we're going to be talking about the evidence behind burnout, especially specifically for healthcare professionals. Burnout is characterized by feelings of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.
But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that burnout is real, and it's an issue you already know. In a study of six university-affiliated hospitals that have been taking care of COVID 19 patients, 53% experience, high levels of burnout. Another study showed that 53.2% of farmers. Reported having one area of burnout, for example, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, or reduced personal accomplishment.
And we're at a high risk of burnout. What I'm going to do from here is share from the evidence what actually helps and what interventions are showing to be promising to support this global issue of healthcare workers burning out and leaving the profession altogether. But before. I think an elephant in the room is that burnout is also impacted by our environment.
The healthcare system saying burnout is only a personal flaw, lack of resilience or a work ethic issue is putting it on the person and is not fair. When the environmental forces are putting pressure on healthcare workers to adjust and adapt to the point of breaking the word burnout itself can feel shameful and harmful.
Is it our fault as healthcare professionals that we're first forced to work more and more and fit more and more patients in a shorter amount of time. Is it fair that we care so much that we'll continue to do it because we want to help people. And that's why we got into the profession in the first place.
How about documenting during our sessions? When we can't look people in the eye and actually hear what's going on with them all to save time and increase revenue before I continue, I want to make sure I make this point. You are impacted by your system. If you feel burnout, it's not just you. Right.
However, right now we're living in the broken healthcare system. How do we make do in the day to day right now and handle struggling through, and we just can't keep going. As occupational therapists, we learn about how our environment is such a big part of shaping our day to day activities. So thinking of the environment makes sense why some of these interventions have been proven to be effective.
I will include both personal interventions as well as environmental, because I think that's really important for this issue to be addressed from both sides. As I mentioned before, The first intervention is practicing mindfulness and yoga, specifically mindfulness based stress reduction that has been shown to have promising results in supporting reducing employee burnout and decreasing stress within the workplace.
Another study found that yoga and meditation is helpful in reducing burnout and physicians and nurses, and had a positive and significant clinical effect. The next intervention is being outside in nature. Which makes total sense. It's showing to be more and more helpful for workers to introduce nature-based interventions to support burns.
And help or it's helping prevent burnout and also recovery. The next intervention is professional coaching, and this is different from mentorship, which the person who is the mentor has superior knowledge to the person that is the mentee professional coaching does not have to be a healthcare professional.
It can be someone who is not knowing the. Actual day-to-day clinical work, but it's focused on having the recipient, navigate their professional life, their choices, and the direction of their career by guiding the person through that process. It's associated with a lot of positive effects, including job satisfaction, resilience, and quality of.
Next intervention is using healthcare teams. Having the ability to work alongside someone, ask questions and be able to bounce ideas off of one. Another is something that I've personally found to be very effective when I feel stuck. And this could be two or more healthcare professionals who work collaboratively with patients and their caregivers to help accomplish shared goals.
This can help increase clinician wellbeing and can be a really big team or even a small team. So even though smaller companies can use this as a tool, lastly, rethinking documentation is important. A lot of times we're documenting and have all this data that we can't even pull from. And it's just clogging of the system.
A lot of times they're doing this for insurance purposes, but a lot of the time we're focusing on getting it done and it might not even be that necessary. How can we streamline this process? So we're clinic documenting clinical improvements and reducing the access so we can spend more time focusing on patients.
Some people argue that the focus on clinicians doing documentation and encoding, submitting things to insurance, doing prescriptions is all a misuse of highly specialized clinical knowledge. There are many companies, especially tech companies trying to help focus on making documentation, a simple streamlined process where people can get back to doing the care that they were educated.
If you're interested in learning, if you're at risk for burnout, there is a self-assessment from the company mind tools that I'll link in the show notes, as well as all of these articles I am sharing about the last thing is there's a great resource of another OT named Erika Del Pozo who owns joy energy time.
Linked to a resource that I found really helpful. And I've used a lot of her resources in the past. And it helps because it's very specific to OT and occupational therapists, but it can help with other healthcare professions as well. One of my favorite moments was when we were able to do a healthcare hangout and I got to meet other people that were healthcare workers in our area.
Um, and she helped start that. So thank you, Erica. For all that work you have done. At the end of the day. I just want you to know that there's a lot of pieces at play with burnout. There are a lot of people trying to figure out what helps. And I think it's the responsibility of both the worker, as well as the organization to really tackle this issue, because we know you can't thrive in an environment that's broken.
If you have questions or have any other interventions that you know of the help burnout, please let us know in our, on our Instagram page at OT graphically, I think this is a topic that many people know about, but a lot of people don't know how to address. So let's share this information so that people can heal and be able to get back to the work they love doing that's all for today.
Thanks so much for listening