mHealth Gratitude Exercise Mindfulness App for Resiliency Among Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Staff: Three-Arm...

Area of Science:

• Healthcare worker well-being
• Mobile health interventions
• Resilience research

Background:

• Healthcare professions are inherently stressful, leading to compassion fatigue and burnout.
• Resilience strategies like gratitude, exercise, and mindfulness can mitigate these negative effects.
• Mobile health (mHealth) interventions offer a scalable approach to delivering these strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To assess the impact of a 3-week daily resilience practice via a smartphone app on healthcare workers' professional quality of life, physical activity, and happiness.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of gratitude, exercise, and mindfulness interventions delivered through mHealth.

Main Methods:

• A 3-week mHealth intervention involving daily gratitude, exercise, and mindfulness prompts.
• 65 participants from a newborn intensive care unit completed pre- and post-intervention assessments.
• Instruments used included the Professional Quality of Life Scale, Physical Activity Vital Sign, and Subjective Happiness Score.

Main Results:

• Analysis of imputed data revealed significant improvements in compassion satisfaction, burnout, secondary trauma stress, exercise, and happiness.
• Individual intervention groups showed varied significant improvements: gratitude (CS, BO, STS, happiness), exercise (STS, exercise), and mindfulness (CS, happiness).
• Original data analysis indicated significant improvements in burnout, secondary trauma stress, and happiness.

Conclusions:

• Smartphone app delivery of resilience interventions is a potentially effective model for healthcare workers.
• mHealth strategies may face barriers such as technical issues.
• Further longitudinal and experimental studies with larger sample sizes are needed to validate this approach.