IUPUI researchers awarded grant to study how staff burnout affects mental health patients

$1.5 grant will support a three-year intervention program

A national research funding organization dedicated to improving patient-centered outcomes in the health care system has awarded $1.5 million to a team of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) researchers to study how staff burnout affects the treatment and progress of mental health patients.

Staff burnout -- emotional exhaustion, depersonalization of patient treatment and a lost sense of personal achievement -- is a common issue facing mental health employees. Past research supports that burnout has a negative effect on clinical providers and the patients they serve, but few studies have explored intervention methods that might improve outcomes for both groups in the treatment relationship.

The $1.5 million award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) will support a team of researchers in the Department of Psychology at IUPUI as they implement the three-year study. The effort is designed to understand the patient perspective of clinician burnout, enact an intervention program and test a framework that examines how burnout is linked to processes, engagement and outcomes.

"We hope to be able to intervene successfully so that clinicians feel less burned out and stressed on the job and more engaged in the quality of care they are delivering," said Michelle Salyers, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Science at IUPUI and co-director of the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) Center of Indiana. "The (patients) will benefit from a caregiver who is fully invested in building strong alliances with them and to working more effectively together."

Salyers is joined on the research team by Assistant Professor Elizabeth Boyd, Ph.D., and ACT Center representatives Heidi Hedrick, M.S., project manager; Angela Rollins, Ph.D., research director; and Dawn Shimp, research assistant.

The crux of their research proposal is the Burnout Reduction: Enhanced Awareness, Tools, Handouts and Education (BREATHE) program, which has shown promise in clinical trials for reducing burnout and developing more positive attitudes among caregivers toward patients. BREATHE incorporates traditional stress-reduction techniques, cognitive behavioral practices, social-skills training and other self-care strategies. Gary Morse, Ph.D., of Places for People, Inc., of Missouri, is the co-developer of the BREATHE intervention.

The program includes several phases and opportunities for the feedback from patients and clinicians to be incorporated and addressed during the intervention strategy, Boyd said. It will test both the interventions and the effect of those actions on patient outcomes, which the team suggests may extend beyond mental health providers to other industries and other job performance metrics.

"Currently, there is great interest in any interventions, processes or wellness initiatives that could have a positive effect on the bottom line," Boyd said.

Boyd, whose expertise is in industrial and organizational psychology, was paired with Salyers, an accomplished clinical psychology researcher, through IUPUI's Enhanced Mentoring Program with Opportunities for Ways to Excel in Research (EMPOWER) program. The EMPOWER program is administered through the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and supports IUPUI faculty in underrepresented or excluded populations through mentoring relationships.

"This program provided me with a structured mentoring relationship and support for submitting external research grants, both of which were invaluable to me," Boyd said.