Three Good Things to Extinguish Caregiver Burnout

Caregiver burnout is a widespread issue in healthcare and institutions should be increasingly concerned about burnout because of the significant impact on quality of patient care, employee health, and financial stability. Many interventions and studies regarding burnout are focused on improving systems issues or removing negative stressors on caregivers. Although such interventions may be necessary to attempt, comprehensive systems-wide changes can be cumbersome and expensive, while removing negative stressors may be an unrealistic goal in a fast-paced, demanding healthcare environment. The Three Good Things method is an evidence-based, effective, simple, low-cost intervention to improve feelings of caregiver burnout in which caregivers write down or share three good things they saw or experienced that day. The idea behind this is to identify and reinforce positive emotions instead of trying to eliminate negative emotions, which can be much more complex. This project aims to create a plan to implement the Three Good Things intervention on a hospital microsystem to see how this stress relief exercise affects and improves reported caregiver burnout compared to current practices, or lack thereof, over a one to two-month period. It is projected that implementing this method at a local San Francisco hospital, which will be referred to as the Hospital, will decrease nursing related burnout and emphasize positive emotions. Changes in burnout are to be reported through the Mini Z burnout survey and staff interviews. Long term benefits of this practice could include reduced spending on nurse turnover and decreased adverse events in patient care. Keywords: burnout, three good things, positive emotion