Coming Soon

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48,502
2024-05-01 to 2024-10-31
Collaborative R&D
It is well known that healthcare worker burnout impacts future health outcomes, the staff retention, and the safety and quality of the care provided to their patients. It is also known that the mental healthcare workforce is at a greater risk of stress, long term sick, and burnout. At a time where the demand on mental health services are at an all-time high, and staffing levels are dramatically under the recommended levels, we feel it is of utmost importance to address burnout, stress and long term retention of staff in order to empower our workforce to optimally care for the vulnerable mental health service user group. The proposed project aims to decrease stress and burnout in the community mental health workforce by co-developing, and testing, Extended Reality (XR) digital environments with staff to improve wellbeing. The current project will work with the workforce to understand their needs, preferences, and the challenges of enhancing staff wellbeing and deploying XR interventions. The initial phase of the project will involve a series of collaborative events with the workforce in order to understand their perspectives on how XR may support wellbeing and the practical considerations when developing and deploying such innovations within the workplace. It is currently unknown which aspects of XR work for different groups so the workforce will help prioritise aspects of XR including gamification, social platforms, nature-based immersion, and mindfulness. These insights will then be underpinned with psychological and behavioural theory to inform the technological design of specific applications. Once the intervention has clear definitions and underpinning, that are mindful of real-world practice, the XR applications will be prototyped. As the levels of XR sophistication develops, the workforce will be consulted to trial the intervention and collect real time information regarding the strengths, weakness, threats, and opportunities of the intervention. These insights will be gathered related to both the successful implementation of the XR intervention, and this intervention achieving its aim. When the design and refinement phase of the work is completed, an evaluation take place to examine the feasibility of an XR wellbeing intervention being used to lessen burnout in community mental health staff. We want to understand what makes the XR intervention work well and how we can keep using it. We're also interested in what we need to consider when expanding the use of this intervention to a larger group of people in this line of work.