The selected article talks about the struggles of health care professionals and how creative exercises help lower stress and increase job satisfaction.
Article Excerpt
Doctors and nurses seldom learn in school how to tell a family that their loved one is not going to survive. Yet health care professionals face the immense burden of tragedy, illness and dying in an intensely stressful setting as a routine, ongoing part of their jobs.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, research was documenting rampant stress and burnout among health care professionals.
Studies show that if current trends continue, the U.S. will see a shortage of 1.1 million registered nurses, 3 million other health care workers and over 140,000 physicians by 2033. A 2022 Mayo Clinic study reported that only 58% of physicians would choose to become a doctor again if offered a chance to revisit their career choice, dropping from 72% from just one year before.
As physicians who have worked in critical care and emergency medicine for many years, we think that this incorporation of creativity in health care is vital. The nation’s health depends on the well-being of the health care workforce. We believe that incorporating creativity and the arts as a tool for building resiliency in healthcare workers could help shift the culture of emotional isolation that health care workers live in.
We as health care workers push ourselves to the limits to learn new ways to enhance human health. The irony is that this often comes at the expense of our own physical, emotional and mental health. We learn to mask emotions and internalize all the negative events we see in health care. But that is unsustainable.
From 2020 to 2023, we carried out six cohorts of our 12-week clinical trial of creative arts therapy interventions involving health care professionals working at least half-time. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four creative arts therapy groups: art, music, dance/movement and writing, with 12 weekly sessions lasting 90 minutes each.
The results were eye-opening. Study participants experienced less burnout and expressed a lower desire to leave their jobs. Burnout scores for anxiety, depression, PTSD and emotional exhaustion decreased by 28%, 36%, 26% and 12%, respectively, in the participants receiving the creative arts therapy intervention. These improvements remained up to one year after the conclusion of the program.
Relevance
Working in the medical field is sometimes a stressful environment due to overworking and the stress of responsibility for others lives. This environment is not the only stressful work environment, many other people report having high levels of stress from their work, and do not have good ways of coping with that stress.
Using your creativity for something not directly related to your stressor is a good way to help release some of that stress and understand yourself a little better. Allowing people to use creativity and have more control over their treatment could aid in overall satisfaction with care. Allowing for creative expression could not only help with satisfaction, but also help improve relationship to care and hopefully promote consistent treatment. This strategy could be something integrated more directly into care or could be something completely separate. I believe that creative expression can be a successful method of increasing patient satisfaction.
Sources
Conversation, T. (2024, September 4). Creative arts therapy programs can help health care workers dance, write and draw their way through burnout: Opinion. pennlive. https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2024/09/creative-arts-therapy-programs-can-help-health-care-workers-dance-write-and-draw-their-way-through-burnout-opinion.html
