Utilizing Meditation to Decrease Nurse Leader Stress and Burnout

Background: It is estimated that 30% of nursing leaders leave their position due to burnout and being overwhelmed with the demands of their roles. Sixty percent of healthcare workers report feeling stress ‘most of the time.’ Meditation has been shown to be a successful way to handle stress. The objective of this quality improvement (QI) project was to explore the effect of a meditation practice on stress levels of nursing leaders. Objectives: The purpose of this QI project was to examine the impact of meditation on the stress levels, and burnout in nursing leaders. Methods: This quasi-experimental study will be done with nursing leaders (i.e., nurse managers, and above) within a 400-bed single public academic medical center, located in Southern California. The mindfulness intervention will consist of an introduction to mindfulness and the UCLA Mindfulness Application (app), a daily meditation using the app. Stress and burnout amongst participants will be measured at baseline using the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL) Scale, and again six weeks following the intervention. Statistical analyses will include descriptive statistics, and t-tests for independent means, and the Mann-Whitney tests to assess for differences in stress between the two time points. Results: The results were not significant at the p <.05 level using either the t test or the Mann-Whitney test. However, due to the exploratory nature of the study, Spearman correlations (rs) were included as a measure of the strength of the relationship between the outcome variable and the group as well as to suggest possible avenues for future research given a larger sample. Moderate strength correlations were found between stress level with group (rs = .37) as well as for secondary traumatic stress with group (rs = .32). For both these comparisons, posttest scores were lower than pretest scores. Conclusion: Meditation is a powerful tool which can help to decrease nurse leader stress and burnout, if practiced on a regular basis