KEEPCARING: Understanding and Improving Healthcare Professionals’ Well-Being
Healthcare professionals worldwide face extraordinary demands that compromise their well-being. As a result, nurses, physicians, and trainees are at heightened risk of stress and burnout, posing a threat to the quality and safety of patient care. This symposium – bringing together researchers and practitioners from the international Horizon KEEPCARING consortium – takes stock of where the field currently stands and highlights promising directions for future research and practice. Across five contributions, we move from theoretical integration, to evidence synthesis, to novel intervention approaches.
We begin by examining why healthcare workers struggle with ill-being. The first contribution (Anna Helena Ursula Malkovskaja) offers a conceptual integration of two major psychological theories: the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT). This novel framework explains how an imbalance between job demands and resources frustrates basic psychological needs of healthcare professionals, thereby driving strain and ultimately burnout.
Next, based on interview data from healthcare professionals in hospitals across multiple European countries, the second contribution (Trina Tamrakar, PhD) provides a cross-national perspective on the factors that contribute to—and buffer against—stress and burnout among healthcare professionals.
Addressing what is currently known about how to improve healthcare professionals’ resilience and well-being, the third contribution (Sophie Vermeulen) presents findings from a systematic review synthesizing evidence from existing intervention studies in healthcare. In addition to highlighting what works in intervention research, this contribution identifies important gaps in the intervention literature.
The fourth contribution (Luisa Solms) introduces a novel bottom-up strategy for enhancing well-being. Drawing on findings from a daily diary study among nursing teams, this study examines how prosocial job crafting—that is, employees proactively reshaping aspects of their work to benefit others—can enhance well-being at both the individual and team level.
The final contribution (Johanne Søborg Hartmann) presents a technology-enhanced team intervention. Using data from a quasi-experimental study among operating room staff, it demonstrates the potential of video-supported debriefing to support well-being in particularly high-stress work environments.
Together, these papers provide an overview of theory, evidence, and innovation in the study of healthcare worker well-being. We close the symposium with a discussion led by Dr. Lara Solms, an expert on employee well-being and healthcare interventions at the University of Amsterdam, who will reflect on the contributions and outline implications for future research and practice.
