Creative arts therapy programs can help health care workers dance, write and draw to overcome burnout | Opinion

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AUTHORS: Marc Moss, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and Rafaela Mantelli, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Doctors and nurses rarely learn in school how to communicate to a family that their loved one is not going to survive. Yet health care professionals face the immense burden of tragedy, illness and death in an extremely stressful environment as a routine and constant part of their jobs.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, research was already documenting rampant stress and burnout among healthcare professionals.

The effects of this crisis are widespread in the U.S. In 2022, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy expressed concern about alarming levels of burnout in the healthcare community amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Studies show that if current trends continue, the United States will see a shortage of 1.1 million registered nurses, 3 million other health care workers, and more than 140,000 physicians by 2033. A 2022 Mayo Clinic study reported that only 58% of physicians would choose to become doctors again if offered the opportunity to review their career choice, down from 72% just one year earlier.

For nearly two decades, our research group (a team of physicians, researchers, creative arts therapists, and writers) has focused on understanding the impact of work-related stress on healthcare workers. In our experience, nearly every healthcare worker has a story about coping with times when the weight of the profession is simply unbearable.

To help address this issue, in 2019, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, our team created the Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab (CORAL). Our goal is to use creative arts therapy as an intervention to improve the well-being of healthcare professionals and restore their sense of purpose in these demanding work environments.

As doctors who have worked in intensive care and emergency medicine for many years, we believe that this incorporation of creativity into healthcare is vital. The health of the nation depends on the wellbeing of healthcare workers. We believe that incorporating creativity and the arts as a tool to develop resilience in healthcare workers could help change the culture of emotional isolation in which healthcare workers live.

A challenge that was long in coming

We, as healthcare workers, go to great lengths to learn new ways to improve 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 healthcare. But that is unsustainable.

In the 2000s, up to 80% of critical care nurses reported suffering from burnout or other forms of psychological distress. This contributed to a high turnover rate: 67% of nurses planned to leave their positions within three years. This was leading to rising health care costs, compassion fatigue among workers, and a decline in the quality of patient care.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which intensified stress on healthcare workers: 3 in 5 doctors reported burnout during the peak of the Omicron variant in 2022.

A combination of increased job demands, workload, job complexity, work pressure, and intensive working hours during the COVID-19 pandemic increased stress among healthcare professionals and led to emotional exhaustion.

Satisfaction with work-life balance fell from 46.1% in 2020 to 30.2% in 2021.

In the post-COVID-19 era, healthcare workers like us are at a higher risk of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Healthcare professionals who suffer from burnout are unlikely to seek professional treatment and, as a result, tend to experience elevated levels of substance use, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

Art as a way forward

In ancient Greece and Rome, participation in the arts was “prescribed” for people with depression or anxiety. Likewise, for centuries, tribal communities have used dance, music, and art to facilitate physical and mental healing.

At CORAL, we have focused on teaching healthcare workers how to use art-making to effectively process trauma and develop coping mechanisms through expression and community. We invite our participants, which include doctors, nurses, social workers, therapists, and researchers, to tap into their authentic vulnerabilities and share stories they wouldn’t normally tell using pencil and paper, paintbrushes, guitars, songwriting, and movement.

From 2020 to 2023, we conducted six cohorts of our 12-week clinical trial of creative arts therapy interventions involving healthcare professionals working at least part-time. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four creative arts therapy groups: art, music, dance/movement, and writing, with 12 weekly sessions of 90 minutes each.

We measured participants’ levels of anxiety, depression, burnout, PTSD, and job satisfaction using validated questionnaires and asked them the same questions again after the intervention ended. We also measured these scores in a control group that did not participate in the intervention.

The results were enlightening. Study participants experienced less burnout and expressed a lower desire to leave their jobs. Scores for burnout from anxiety, depression, PTSD, and emotional exhaustion decreased by 28%, 36%, 26%, and 12%, respectively, in participants who received the creative arts therapy intervention. These improvements were maintained up to one year after completion of the program.

Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that creative arts therapy can be an effective tool to address burnout in healthcare workers around the world.

We believe creative art therapy is effective because it allows these health care professionals to be imperfect, freedoms that can be healing in and of themselves. They can take advantage of these opportunities to express the unspeakable through an art form, which becomes a vehicle to help explore and recover from trauma.

This, in turn, can increase their tolerance for imperfection and help them feel grace and compassion for themselves and others. It expands their emotional vocabulary and, in doing so, builds their resilience.

Remembering what it means to be human

Although the role of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals is often glorified by terms like “superheroes” and “guardian angels,” they are actually human beings who make mistakes and also get burned out.

The creative process invites them to remember what it means to be human, to be vulnerable. A health care professional who picks up a paintbrush for the first time since kindergarten can explore feelings that have been repressed, memories that have been buried, and even forgiveness for mistakes that may have been held in for years.

One CORAL participant wrote in his comments: “When I am given space to unmask and show all my facets, I am creative and engaged. I think more deeply and clearly. I am more willing to take the risks necessary to achieve breakthroughs. I am a better colleague, mentor, friend, partner, and scientist. When I feel safe and supported, I can feel whole.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/creative-arts-therapy-programs-can-help-health-care-workers-dance-write-and-draw-their-way-through-burnout-and-on-the-job-stress-220034.