Associate professor serves as co-investigator on $50,000 UMB CARES pilot grant-funded project examining burnout among the behavioral health workforce.
Kelly Doran, PhD ’11, MS ’08, RN, FAAN, associate professor, is the co-investigator on a project that recently received a one-year University of Maryland Center for Addiction Research, Education, and Service Science to Systems pilot grant in the amount of $50,000.
The project, "Preventing Early Career Burnout and Attrition in Early Career Behavioral Health Professionals in Social Work and Nursing: A Qualitative Pilot Study," has two sprecific aims:
- Examine how early career nurses and social workers in behavioral health settings remain engaged with their work and avoid occupational burnout and explore the acceptability of potential individual-level approaches.
- Explore the feasibility and scalability of retention intervention components for implementation among new clinicians working in behavioral health settings.
Occupational burnout results from the stresses associated with issues such as understaffing and turnover; burnout is a combination of exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism, and a sense of inefficacy and hopelessness. Burnout has negative consequences for organizational climate, clinician well-being, and ultimately patient outcomes.
The state of the behavioral health workforce has been building towards a crisis point for decades. More than 20 years ago, even before the opioid epidemic and COVID-19 disrupted all areas of American life, experts identified a serious workforce shortage in behavioral health. Insufficient providers are not the only issue facing the behavioral health workforce. In the public behavioral health system, working conditions are very stressful, creating a cycle of turnover that makes the shortage problem even worse. Employee attrition at behavioral health settings has been estimated at a staggering 30% annually. Related to the cycle of chronic turnover and a cause of attrition, burnout among health care providers in general, and behavioral health providers in particular, is a major concern which has only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The principal investigator on the interpfrofessional project is Paul Sacco, PhD, MSW, associate professor in the University of Maryland School of Social Work (UMSSW), and Laura Ting, PhD, MA, also in the UMSSW, is another co-investigator.