Mental Health Professionals’ experiences of managing work stress

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Mental Health Professionals’ experiences of managing work stress and burnout: A Qualitative Study.

• IRAS ID

  277443

• Contact name

  Annie Irvine

• Contact email

  annie.irvine@york.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of York

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 6 months, 12 days

• Research summary

  The study aims to explore the views and experiences of mental health professionals about how they manage work stress and burnout. Stress and burnout in mental health professionals has been widely investigated in various literature. Existing research has generally focused on exploring if mental health professionals experience stress and burnout, and not how they manage feeling stress and burnout, which is what this study is aiming to do.
  The study will be using qualitative methods and interviewing 8-10 mental health professionals in a NHS mental health trust. The study will be targeting mental health professionals from community mental health teams. Community mental health teams largely operate as multi-disciplinary teams meaning that that they have a wide range of different professionals. Additionally, there may be unique stresses present in community mental health teams due to the ever growing numbers of service users coming into the teams. Those working in inpatient or crisis teams are likely to experience different factors contributing towards work stress than those in the community. As this is a small scale study for a master’s degree, there is not the scope to explore their experiences in addition in as much depth. I am aiming to recruit, mental health support workers, psychiatrists, mental health social workers, community psychiatric nurses, psychologists and occupational therapists. I will be using an interview format and question the professionals on any coping strategies that they use, if they feel able to manage stress and burn out and how they have recovered from feeling burnout. Interviews will then be transcribed and anonymised, then analysed using Thematic Analysis.

  This research should be able to add to our understanding of what steps or coping strategies that mental health workers use to manage stress. This information may be able to be used to encourage resilience in other mental/healthcare workers.

• REC name

  N/A

• REC reference

  N/A