Healthcare Innovation, Clinical Staff Wellbeing and Burnout

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Healthcare Innovation, Clinical Staff Wellbeing/Burnout - Researching Interactions and Solutions (HIWBRIS)

• IRAS ID

  346499

• Contact name

  Sarah Townsend

• Contact email

  VUNHSTResearchSponsor@wales.nhs.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Velindre University NHS Trust

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 8 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  Innovation is a constant and essential feature of healthcare. It is key to how healthcare adapts, changes and improves, ensuring healthcare can keep up to date and respond to the need to deliver new treatments, use new technologies or new ways of working. There are many positives to such innovation – for the quality of patient care, it can support and encourage individual clinical staff and is important for healthcare organisations/systems.
  Clinical staff struggle with high workplace pressures and limited resources, resulting in stress and sometimes, burnout. Worryingly, burnout levels are higher in healthcare clinical staff than other professional groups – typically affecting upwards of 30% of clinical staff. Burnout can affect the quality of patient care, the health of individual staff members and the resilience/sustainability of healthcare services.
  Both innovation and staff wellbeing are important topics for healthcare.
  Balancing the competing demands of delivering high quality care (in the face of limited resources and increasing demands) with the need to innovate is not easy. Innovation can be a very positive process, but can create additional work, stresses and uncertainty for clinical staff. Some work (largely outside healthcare) demonstrates interactions between wellbeing/burnout and innovative working behaviours. This hasn't been well researched in healthcare. Given the high levels of burnout affecting clinical staff in the NHS, this could be an important omission. Clinical staff burnout could be an under-recognised barrier to innovation; wellbeing could be an enabler. Innovation could have positive or negative effects on clinical staff wellbeing/burnout. Researching potential interactions (positive and negative in both directions) could help improve healthcare through enhancing innovation capacity and capability plus also improving clinical staff wellbeing.

• REC name

  N/A

• REC reference

  N/A