Web-based Implementation for the Science of Enhancing Resilience Study

Stanford University2,650 enrolled

Overview

Resilience means a healthcare provider's ability to cope, recover, and learn from stressful events, as well as their access to resources that promote health and well-being. Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) health professionals' need to have particularly good resilience, because their work is extremely stressful and their patients, fragile preterm infants, require their undivided attention. The investigators propose a feasible and engaging intervention to enhance resilience among NICU health professionals promoting their ability to provide safe care.

Optimizing provider well-being is critical to the delivery of safe and high quality care to the most vulnerable of patients: very preterm babies. Major innovative objectives of this proposal include testing the Web-based Implementation for the Science of Enhancing Resilience (WISER) program's effectiveness in enhancing resilience among Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) health workers, evaluating its effect on unit safety culture, and examining its effect on clinical outcomes in preterm infants. The WISER program is an established but low-intensity yet engaging intervention, which integrates education and behavior modification to boost provider well-being and resilience in order to create an organizational environment which prevents patient harm. Care for the more than 50,000 very low birth weight (VLBW; \< 1500 gm) infants born annually in the United States is challenging and expensive. Quality of care and outcomes vary widely. Increasing technical demands and patient acuity have pushed burnout among health workers to the breaking point. The few tested interventions that improve caregiver resilience lack feasibility for widespread adoption. This study is designed to achieve the following aims: 1. Test the effectiveness of WISER in improving NICU health professional resilience; 2. Test the effectiveness of WISER in improving patient safety and organizational outcomes; 3. Test the sustainability of WISER; and 4. Describe the barriers and facilitators of the WISER program. The investigators will test the efficacy of the WISER Program in the NICU setting using a stepped-wedge mixed-methods randomized controlled trial (swRCT) at six tertiary care NICUs. The results of this trial will also provide insights into the causal relations between health worker resilience, the organizational environment, and clinical outcomes among infants born VLBW. Two blocks with 3 NICUs each will be randomly assigned to one of two intervention cohorts. The WISER NICUs program consists of six 10-minute videos delivered over the course of a six-month period. Following the end of the initial intervention, each NICU will receive individualized feedback/refresher webinar at 12 months, and a final follow-up at 24 months. The investigators will use measures of perception (surveys of health professional's perceptions) and quantifiable measures (clinical measures) to assess the efficacy of the intervention in different domains (resilience, organizational environment, and health). Qualitative methods will provide further insights into facilitators and barriers of the efficacy of WISER.

Conditions

Burnout, Professional Resilience, Psychological

Interventions

Three Good ThingsBEHAVIORAL

In this tool participants reflect on "good things" that happened that day during evenings across 10 days. Participants are also able to voluntarily share their good things and read other participants' good things through the nightly anonymous log. By savoring good moments from earlier that day, participants are thought to shift from the natural focus on "what went poorly" due to negativity bias1 to an appreciation for what went well. This shift in focus is thought to reduce rumination and depression symptoms. In prior research, 3GTs was found to increase happiness and decrease depression in internet participants.2 In prior cohorts of 3GTs, we saw improvements in burnout, depression symptoms, work-life balance, and happiness. Participants also report benefiting from viewing nightly Three Good Things logs of others.

GratitudeBEHAVIORAL

In this tool participants are offered the opportunity to cultivate gratitude toward others through a guided gratitude letter writing exercise.2 Through expressing gratitude, we learn more about our vital connections to others, often in surprising and meaningful ways. Previous research has found that gratitude interventions increase well-being in a number of ways, particularly in boosting positive affect.

Eligibility

Sex: ALLMin age: 18 YearsMax age: 85 YearsHealthy volunteers:

Medical Language ↔ Plain English

Inclusion Criteria: 1. Location: newborn center, i.e. the NICU or a step down unit 2. Provider: 1. Primary work place is the Newborn Center 2. Full time equivalent of \>=40% 3. Date of hire more than 4 weeks prior to start of the intervention 3. Provider groups: 1. Attendings that identify your newborn center as their primary site of work (not physicians from satellite NICUs) 2. NICU fellows 3. Nurse practitioners 4. Physician Assistants 5. Nurses, including nurse leadership (managers, educators) 6. Nurse Assistant 7. Respiratory care providers 8. Transport specialists if primarily neonatal transport team 9. Newborn Center Social workers 10. Newborn Center Clerks 11. Newborn Center Pharmacists 12. Newborn Center Physical, Occupational, Speech, and Developmental Therapists 13. Newborn Center Nutritionists 14. Newborn Center Lactation Consultants Exclusion Criteria: 1. Location: Labor and delivery or the newborn nursery 2. Provider: Work is delivered mostly outside the newborn center (this may affect providers who delivery services across the hospital such as residents, surgeons, anesthesia, consultants, nutritionists, PT/OT (these are included if they are mostly dedicated to the newborn center) 3. Float personnel 4. Does not speak english 5. Cannot operate computer or smart phone

Locations (9)

Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford

Palo Alto, California, United States

Stanford University Medical Center

Stanford, California, United States

Beth Israel Deconness Medical Center

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Outcomes

Primary Outcomes

NICU health professional resilience

Burnout (emotional exhaustion) is the primary resilience outcome. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) has been the gold standard tool in the field of burnout research. In our investigations, the Emotional Exhaustion subscale, in particular, is consistently associated with variables such as staff turnover, disruptive behavior, productivity, delays, and teamwork. When used as a "percent agree" metric, we have shown it to be a very effective indicator of emotional exhaustion at the group level for a clinical area or work setting. We will use a shortened 4-item version of this subscale from the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which we validated in the NICU setting. The response scale ranges from 1 (disagree strongly) to 5 (agree strongly). Resilience will be calculated as the percentage of NICU providers who disagree slightly or strongly with the 4 items assessing features of emotional exhaustion.

Time frame: 10 days, 1 month, 6 months, 12 months

Secondary Outcomes

Work-Life Balance

Work-Life Balance (WLB). WLB items were adopted from the College Activities and Behavior Questionnaire. These items that can be interpreted at face-value. All items are prefaced with, "during the past week, how often did this occur" and include items such as "argued with a co-professional" and "arrived home late from work"; they are answered on a four-point scale (0 = rarely or none; 3 = all of the time). Each of these items individually is face-valid and interpretable, but together they make for robust debriefings and discussions linking QI to work-life balance. They are internally consistent, with a Cronbach's alpha of α = 0.82 in our large resilience database.

Time frame: 10 days, 1 month, 6 months, 12 months

Depressive symptoms

The Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale-10-item version (CES-D10), a psychometrically sound tool for screening respondents for clinical depression, consists of ten items. All items are prefaced with, "during the past week, how often did this occur," include items such as "I could not 'get going'" and "my sleep was restless," and are answered on a four-point scale (0 = rarely or none; 3 = all of the time). Each participant's responses are summed together to achieve a 0- to 30-point scale. A score of 10 or higher is considered a positive screen. We have used the CES-D10 in several WISER and three good things studies without any problems under the existing IRB. The CES-D10 is not a suicide screening tool, it is explicitly used to screen for depression without a suicide item.

Data from ClinicalTrials.gov

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