Physician Anxiety and Burnout: Symptom Correlates and a Prospective Pilot Study of
App-Delivered Mindfulness Training
(Roy, Druker, Hoge, & Brewer, 2020)
By Michael Juberg
Before the COVID-19 pandemic overloaded many of the medical systems across the world, medical professionals were already vulnerable to burnout and anxiety. As the COVID-19 pandemic places greater emotional and physical demand on their work, there is a heightened urgency to develop self-care practices that reduce burnout and ultimately provide higher quality of patient care.
Renewed efforts to develop self-care practices for medical professionals have been met with hesitation due to the time constraints and lack of consensus about the root cause of burnout. Previous studies have shown that mindfulness training for medical professions have been effective at targeting burnout and anxiety, however, the time-intensive mindfulness training present a significant barrier for providers with limited time commitment.
A new study investigated whether a brief mindfulness training designed to reduce physician burnout could be delivered through a smartphone app. The mindfulness training specifically targets anxiety and the cycle of anxiety that is perpetuated through reinforcement learning. The app delivers daily content for one month consisting of short lessons, randomly prompted assessments, guided meditations (5-15 minutes) and brief (30 second) mindfulness practices. The study recruited 57 physicians who participated during the spring and summer of 2018. Measures of anxiety and burnout, measured by cynicism and emotional exhaustion, were collected at the start of the study, one month, and finally three months later.
Study results revealed that physicians reduced their anxiety from their baseline scores by 48% after one month of training and by 57% reduction three months later. The researchers then examined cynicism and emotional exhaustion and found a 50% reduction in cynicism and 20% reduction of emotional exhaustion that were both consistent from the 1-month assessment and 3-month follow up. While the study demonstrated that participants completed an average of 37% of the daily modules with a 70% satisfaction rating immediately after the intervention, participants completed 50% of the daily modules 3 months later with an average satisfaction rating of 80%.
“…an app-based delivery of mindfulness training is both feasible and appealing to those physicians already suffering from burnout and limited availability to develop self-care practices.”
The findings from this study contribute to a growing body of evidence supporting brief mindfulness interventions to reduce anxiety and burnout for medical professionals. Importantly, this study found evidence that anxiety was significantly correlated to indices of burnout at every measurement timepoint.
As the study authors highlight, an app-based delivery of mindfulness training is both feasible and appealing to those physicians already suffering from burnout and limited availability to develop self-care practices.
While this study is novel in demonstrating the efficacy of an app-based mindfulness training for physicians, it should be noted that a small self-selected group of providers and lack of control group limit the scope of these conclusions. Future studies will have the opportunity to examine whether such app-based mindfulness interventions work for a variety of medical professionals and during such periods of heightened emergency medical need.
