Evaluation of an intervention for staff in a long-term care facility using a retrospective pretest design

It has been previously established that human service workers often suffer from emotional exhaustion, which has been conceptualized by Maslach and Jackson as burnout. Burnout may be a particularly great risk in workers providing long-term geriatric care. The current study evaluated the effects of a series of three 3-hour sessions designed to address team building, communication skills, self-esteem, and stress management on a random sample of 51 of the 188 long-term care staff who participated. Using a retrospective pretest design, a statistically significant improvement from "then" to "today" was found for the three components of burnout: Depersonalization, Emotional Exhaustion, and Personal Accomplishment. Responses to an open-ended question about workshop effects corroborated the quantitative data, and effects noted were highly related to the defined objectives of the workshops.