A particular aim of mine in starting this blog was to bring research I have been involved in to a wider audience. So with this in mind, here is a post introducing readers to a series of studies I worked on, with Cardiff colleagues, from the late 1990s to around 2006.
The All Wales Community Mental Health Nursing Stress Study was our first project, led by Professor Philip Burnard. Included in the team were Deborah Edwards, Dave Coyle, Anne Fothergill and myself. Our funding was from the GNC for England and Wales Trust, and we aimed to find out about the causes, moderators and outcomes of stress in community mental health nurses (CMHNs) working in Wales. Our data were generated using a demographic questionnaire and these previously created measures:
- Maslach Burnout Inventory
- General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12)
- Rosenberg Self-Attitude Questionnaire
- Community Psychiatric Nursing Stress Questionnaire (Revised)
- Psychnurse Methods of Coping Questionnaire
Our first published paper was this literature review, which Scopus tells me has thus far been cited in 66 subsequent publications. We went on to publish a series of data-based articles from the study, in some of the journals whose names I have added to the word cloud above. The references for these papers are listed here, along with a brief summary of our headline findings.
The team’s next study was a systematic review of stress management in the mental health professions. This was funded by the Wales Office of R&D for Health and Social Care, which was the predecessor body to NISCHR. We found far more papers describing how stressed people are than we found papers suggesting solutions to this problem. Follow this link for a reference list and project summary.
Finally in this series of projects was a study ‘to identify the factors that may influence the effectiveness of clinical supervision and to establish the degree to which clinical supervision might influence levels of reported burnout in community mental health nurses in Wales, UK‘. An expanded team this time included Linda Cooper, John Adams and Tara Jugessur. This study involved the distribution of two questionnaires, again to community mental health nurses in Wales:
- Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)
- Manchester Clinical Supervision Scale
This project, too, has a webpage giving details of our main findings and of our published papers.
In the years since this last project concluded I have had conversations with people on what the next line of inquiry might be. The questions we first asked some 15 years ago seem to me to be as relevant today as they were then. I imagine there remain large numbers of very stressed and burned-out mental health practitioners out there. I also suspect there is still work to do to protect the well-being of staff, and to promote their resilience.
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