Socio-behaviour change intervention in health care professionals: Impact and effectiveness

Abstract

In the health care domain, particularly within the emergency department, staff endures significant stress due to several factors, such as misinformation circulating online, patient and relative distress, the requirement of rapid decision-making, and an unreasonably high workload. Government health care workers face additional pressure from the public, who feel entitled to demand services as taxpayers, leading to chaos in the emergency department. This chronic stress can lead to physical and psychological health issues, decreased job satisfaction and attrition from the profession. The psychological toll can manifest as compassion fatigue, diminishing empathy for patients, which may precipitate inappropriate conduct in emergency settings and exacerbate tense situations. This will further escalate when patients and relatives are angry and lead to major mishaps. Burnout is common, increasing susceptibility to medical errors, substance abuse and mental health crises, including self-harm and suicide risks. Therefore, it was identified that there was a crucial need to equip emergency staff with the necessary skills to navigate the frequent challenges they face.

Following ethics committee approval, the felt need for such a socio-behavioural intervention was sought using tool validated by Baitha et al¹ Alongside this, the existing Socio-Behavioural Communication Course (SBCC) module, which was being used in other medical schools was enhanced and validated by state level resource persons. A Train-the-Trainer program was conducted for the faculty who will teach this course. Expressions of interest for the SBCC Course were invited from the staff of the emergency medicine department. The participants included security, technical and nursing staff, as well as junior/senior postgraduate students/residents and faculty up to the head and professor levels. Out of the participants, 74.4% were Male and 35.3% were Female. Age distribution was as follows: 24.2% (20–25 years), 56.8% (26–30 years), 15.8% (31–35 years) and 3.2% (>35 years). A comprehensive one-day training session was organised based on the needs identified, incorporating a pre-test, post-test and feedback mechanism to measure effectiveness in reference to Kirkpatrick levels one and two.

The intervention was met with robust support from the administration and active participation by the attendees. The workshop was rated highly, with feedback scores ranging from 3.8 to 4 out of 5 across various criteria, such as clarity of objectives, participant engagement, topic relevance, content organisation and enhancement of knowledge concerning effective patient communication. The participants also expressed satisfaction with the time allocation, venue and audiovisual facilities. Statistically significant improvements were observed in the domains of interpersonal communication, social etiquette, managing expectations, forgiveness, grief counselling, crowd management, conflict prevention, stress management and mental health awareness, including suicide prevention. The participants recognised the workshop's utility in their clinical practice and residency. Further studies can be done to validate the benefits in the clinics.

Chinmay Shah: Conceptualization; investigation; writing – original draft; methodology; validation; visualization; formal analysis; project administration; data curation; supervision; resources; funding acquisition. Fouzia Shersad: Conceptualization; investigation; writing – original draft; methodology; validation; visualization; formal analysis; supervision; data curation.

There is no conflict of interest.