Background: Healthcare providers in highly stressful environments experience the effects of workplace stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress due to several work-related factors. Among them, ethical issues, high emotional burden, institutional and patient/family demands are commonly experienced stressors. These experiences can be characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment related to poor professional quality of life and lack of self-care. Prolonged, these characteristics may result in unsatisfactory quality outcomes and patient safety events. The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges in providing healthcare to the critically ill and additional pressures on the professional quality of life of advanced practice providers (APPs). Resources are needed to support APPs in navigating the many stressors experienced and maintain a satisfactory professional quality of life. Mindfulness based interventions have been used to promote self-care abilities to improve professional well-being and work life-balance in many professions including healthcare. Mobile mindfulness applications are available and can allow mindfulness practices to be easily accessed and integrated into daily practice.
Methods: A quality improvement approach was utilized to implement and evaluate a mobile mindfulness-based application. Thirty-seven APPs were recruited from a large urban medical center, within 8 different ICU specialties, during the second wave of the COVID -19 outbreak in October 2020 through -January 2021. All participants were asked to practice a 10 minute daily mindfulness-based intervention via a mobile application (Headspace) for 30 days. A quasi-experimental pre-and post-test design was used to measure professional quality of life and mindfulness before and after the intervention.
Objectives: To determine the portability and efficacy of a mobile mindfulness application to improve provider compassion satisfaction, burnout, secondary stress, and mindfulness over one month.
Findings/Conclusion: Overtime, the intervention did show a statically significant increase in mindfulness while professional quality of life did not change significantly from pre-test to post-test. External factors including seasonal holidays and abrupt increases in mandatory work hours may have negatively influenced recruitment and compliance. The most commonly cited barriers to app use were time and remembering to use the app. The quality improvement project provides important information than can be used to develop future projects addressing mindfulness in APPs.