Walking to Reduce Stress & Burnout in Behavioral Healthcare Workers

Abstract

Purpose: This quality improvement project educated the providers at Urgent Psychiatric Center in Phoenix on using walking as an effective intervention to reduce stress and mitigate burnout in the bigger picture of health. Background: Work stress can have detrimental physical and emotional impacts, harming one's physical and mental well-being. Mental health affects how we feel, think, and act. Being exposed to stress long-term can lead to the phenomenon known as burnout. Burnout is becoming more common and may impact patient safety, treatment quality, and patient access to care. Providers who are burned out are more likely to quit their jobs, leading to endangering patient safety and care quality. Walking is a simple, accessible, and effective tool many behavioral healthcare providers can use to reduce job-related stress. Method: The quality improvement project utilized the Model for Improvement and PSDA cycle. Participants were recruited via email to attend a live in-service educating them on stress, burnout, and walking intervention to help reduce both. Participants completed a pretest and posttest survey to measure their knowledge of stress and burnout symptoms and the benefit of the walking intervention in reducing both. Results: A total of 40 BHPs received the invitation to participate via email. In the end, 16 BHPs received the disclosure statement and the Stress/Burnout/Walking PowerPoint presentation. Six BHPs completed the pretest and posttest surveys, PSS surveys, and walking logs. Improvement was found in the BHPs willingness to participate in a walking intervention to reduce stress. After collecting the PSS survey and walking logs, the BHPs perceived stress levels were reduced after walking. Conclusion: This DNP project was a valuable learning process for the student in designing, implementing a project, and analyzing the results. Future projects could be further explored using this project as a template.