Embracing Change: A Mindful Medical Center Meets COVID-19

Abstract

Background Healthcare professional (HCP) burnout transcends clinician job title and role, thus creating a need for interprofessional strategies to address burnout. The organizational framework of offering employer-sponsored mindfulness programming to HCPs sets the stage for an orchestrated, mindful response to COVID-19. Objective This single arm pre-post interventional research tested changes in measures of burnout, resilience, perceived stress and work engagement for interprofessional HCP faculty and students participating in Mindfulness in Motion (MIM), a novel eight-week multimodal evidenced–based onsite intervention. Methods A Graduate Medical Education (GME) pilot of MIM was expanded to target inter-professional resiliency within an academic health center. MIM is the core offering of the Gabbe Health and Wellness program for students, staff, faculty, and residents and is embedded across the entire medical center. Results The faculty/student role demographic categories (n = 267) included resident physicians, resident chaplains, attending physicians, medical center faculty, and hospital administrative/managerial clinical staff. These cohorts demonstrated significant 27% reduction in participants meeting burnout criteria. Total burnout was determined by scores on subscales of emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA) of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). There was a highly significant pre/post decrease in the in the emotional exhaustion (p < 0.00001) and depersonalization scores (p < 0.001), with highly significant increase in the personal accomplishment (p < 0.00001) scores. Resilience, as measured by the Connor Davidson Resiliency Scale (CDRS), significantly increased (p < 0.00001), alongside a significant increase (p < 0.00001) in the total Utrecht Work Engagement Score (UWES) and a significant decrease in scores on the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) (p < 0.00001). Conclusion MIM significantly reduced burnout and perceived stress, for interprofessional (HCP) faculty and staff, while increasing resilience and work engagement in a large healthcare system. These results paved the way for an organizational response that utilized mindfulness to empower HCPs to navigate through the novel challenges presented by COVID-19.

The experience of nursing leadership in a crisis: A hermeneutic phenomenological study

“…Gentle deep breathing (Noble & Hochman, 2019) can return the body to a parasympathetic state, allowing for significantly better decision‐making (De Couck et al, 2019). Mindfulness techniques practised in an academic research centre during COVID‐19 significantly decreased emotional exhaustion and stress and increased work engagement (Klatt et al., 2020). Practising slow deep breathing or mindfulness techniques routinely may strengthen one's ability to induce physiological relaxation in a disaster.…”

Evaluation of a Yoga-Based Mind-Body Intervention for Resident Physicians: A Randomized Clinical Trial

“…MBIs have been successfully implemented at scale, demonstrated by the Mindful Medical Center. 56 Finally, medicine is an inherently stressful profession, so providing an MBI could be considered essential resiliency skills training, similar to other high-performing professions. 57 …”

Synchronous Mindfulness in Motion Online: Strong Results, Strong Attendance at a Critical Time for Health Care Professionals (HCPs) in the COVID Era

“…Although analyses only confirm the effectiveness of MIM on its participants, trends within the data have shown its ability to create a mindful medical center (Klatt M. D. et al, 2020 ). Indication of this increasing mindfulness culture at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) may be seen in the baseline resiliency scores.…”

“…Prior to the onset of the pandemic, over 420 HCPs at OSUWMC had completed this organizationally sponsored program, perhaps prompting a halo effect for others, extending benefits that go beyond the participant to others within the organization. With so many OSUWMC HCPs exposed to formal mindfulness programming, they have reported being more mindful with their patients, colleagues, and supervisors, eliciting a culture change at the medical center (Klatt M. D. et al, 2020 ). This could be a protective function of MIM in times of increased stress and demands of HCPs, such as during a pandemic.…”

“…Mindfulnessbased interventions successfully reduce burnout among HCPs, leading to downstream benefits affecting HCPs themselves, the patients they care for, and the health system who employs them (Luken and Sammons, 2016). Mindfulness in Motion (MIM), one such mindfulness-based intervention designed specifically for HCPs, has been studied in detail with strong results showing burnout reductions (Klatt et al, 2015(Klatt et al, , 2018(Klatt et al, , 2021Steinberg et al, 2017;Moffatt-Bruce et al, 2019;Klatt M. D. et al, 2020). Until now, this program, like most research surrounding mindfulness-based interventions for HCPs, has focused on inperson interventions, though other virtual mindfulness-based interventions have been studied and reported in the literature.…”