Burnout education, normatives and digital tools for European Universities Erasmus Project

Project Title

Burnout education, normatives and digital tools for European Universities

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Reaching the policy level/dialogue with decision makers

Project Summary

Extensive scientific literature highlights that healthcare professionals’ work is relentlessly overloaded and emotionally overwhelming, influencing their personal lives, and thus, favouring burnout development. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is the final outcome of continuous workplace stress that has not been managed efficiently. In the context of the global extension of burnout in health care and of its introduction in the 11th revised edition of the International Classification of Diseases, it has become a matter of urgency to address this issue in a timely and effective manner. For medical and health allied fields, the proper time for prevention is throughout university years, for two main reasons. Firstly, burnout may occur quite early during the university studies and can develop up to a cumulative prevalence ranging from 44.2% (Frajerman et al., 2019) to 75% (Erschens et al., 2019). Secondly, when starting a new career, the development of personal skills to prevent burnout in physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, and other health allied professionals may be decisive for proper management of professional stress, which in turn, can be reflected in a better quality of care.

THE AIM OF BENDiT-EU PROJECT: The aim of our project is to prepare a comprehensive set of resources that will address the issue of burnout in health and health allied universities at three distinct levels: organizational (IO4), collective (IO3) and individual (IO2), including all stakeholders (IO1).

THE TARGET GROUPS: In the BENDiT-EU project, based on our triple approach mentioned above, we target: a) the INDIVIDUAL level: medical and allied health students in 5 partner countries (Romania, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and Bulgaria); b) the COLLECTIVE level: support staff who work in the 5 BENDiT-EU medical universities; this includes teaching staff who might have an intensive supervising role (mentors, tutors, advisers, etc.), staff working in psychological counselling for students, and staff working in other services aimed at providing different forms of support to students; and c) the ORGANISATIONAL level: representatives of governing bodies, responsible with policymaking at the university level.

THE OBJECTIVES, ACTIVITIES, AND RESULTS: 1) RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT BURNOUT (IO1): we will start with a comprehensive search of literature for evidence of effective interventions regarding academic burnout prevention and synthesize the information in a very accessible format, specifically a Burnout Manual – pocket edition. We selected this format (similar to medical pocket guides, to which health professionals are used) considering that accessibility is important for conveying our key messages on a wide scale, and also on the premise that (a) burnout prevention can become a daily habit and (b) self-treatment is easily available. 2) DEVELOP ONLINE TOOLS (IO2): based on IO1, we will develop a web-based application that will offer students the possibility to self-assess burnout and, based on their results, to receive counselling and suggestions for further reading, training or other forms of skills development in preventing or addressing burnout. 3) CREATE A BURNOUT CURRICULUM (IO3): as a complement to the online web-application, a five day, face to face, experiential research-based program for students and a short training program for support staff will be implemented in partner universities. 4) DRIVE POLICY CHANGES (IO4): a policy toolkit to support decision-makers in universities will also be developed by using consensus-making methods (such as a Delphi approach). The toolkit will summarize best practices on an international level and will provide a set of measures that medical and health allied universities could implement, in order to decrease student burnout. We expect that around 5000 students and staff from medical partner universities will be involved in our project through one or more of the IOs.

THE LONG-TERM BENEFIT: The highly comprehensive approach we are employing for BENDiT-EU project has the potential cumulative advantage of a multi-layered intervention. By addressing all levels where burnout can be efficiently managed (i.e. individual, collective, and organizational), we increase the chances of a potential large scale effect, occurring throughout the project in partner universities. This effect could be reached also at the European level, when making available to other countries or academic structures the BENDiT-EU package, i.e. the Burnout manual – pocket edition, the web-based application for students, the experiential training curriculum for students and the train-the-trainer guide for support staff, as well as a policy toolkit for the decision-makers. As burnout may generate huge societal costs and impact the quality of life of many people, we hope that our project could contribute to fighting this phenomenon in a timely and efficient manner.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 206780 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITATEA DE MEDICINA SI FARMACIE’CAROL DAVILA’ DIN BUCURESTI & Country: RO

Project Partners

• University of Nicosia
• SCOALA NATIONALA DE SANATATE PUBLICA, MANAGEMENT SI PERFECTIONARE IN DOMENIUL SANITAR BUCURESTI
• VITALE TECNOLOGIE COMUNICAZIONE – VITECO SRL
• COFAC COOPERATIVA DE FORMACAO E ANIMACAO CULTURAL CRL
• TRAKIYSKI UNIVERSITET
• UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA