Implementation and Evaluation of Burnout Training for Outpatient Mental Health Nurse Practitioners

Background: Burnout for mental health providers is negatively impacting Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) as it harms their physical and mental health. Nursing burnout, including APRN burnout, is costly for organizations, hinders patient care and degrades patient outcomes. This educational intervention was implemented to attain the current burnout rate for mental health providers, and to find if a burnout attrition training changed education about burnout, affected sick calls and attrition rates, knowledge, subjective feelings about the training.Methods: Utilizing best practice guidelines, we developed and presented an educational program about burnout mitigation with take-home materials from existing curricula, for outpatient APRNs at a psychiatric outpatient Veterans Administration (VA) clinic. Pre-intervention surveys and two post-intervention surveys were sent to the APRNs to measure the effectiveness of the education in terms of existing burnout knowledge, changes in burnout symptoms using a Likert-like scale, and subjective feelings regarding burnout. Pre- and post-intervention, we assessed HR data (sick calls and attrition) for the participating APRNs for two comparable three-month timeframes.Results: For a sample size of 20 APRNs, comparative results show that the attrition rate did not change before and after the intervention. The sick call rate increased by 115% after the educational intervention for the same sample. The sample size for the first, pre-intervention survey, and the second survey was 22 APRNs. The third survey provided 15 weeks later had 18 of the original APRN group respond. Overwhelmingly, the subjective satisfaction of the training was overall positive for 22 APRNs in the second survey. Additionally, the burnout knowledge of the participants changed very little as verified, statistically using a McNemar test comparing the first and second survey results. APRN burnout assessment ratings from the Likert-like scale, before (n=22) and 15 weeks after (n=18) the intervention, were unchanged using a Mann-Whitney test.Conclusions: The high rate of increased sick calls is possibly associated with increased APRN or a renewed awareness of work/life balance. Self-reported APRN burnout ratings did not change significantly over three months. Due to time restrictions, only three months of data were available for comparison from one year to the past year during a comparable time frame. APRN participants showed robust interest in burnout training and satisfaction with the educational program. We recommend to use the feedback from this educational training to repeat the intervention in an online module format and follow up for a more extended time to measure the long-term effects of an APRN burnout training.