Evaluation of an Intervention for Staff in a Long-Term Care Facility Using a Retrospective Pretest Design

Abstract

It has been previously established that human service workers often suffer from emotional exhaustion, which has been conceptualized by Maslach and Jackson as burnout. Burnout may be a particularly great risk in workers providing long-term geriatric care. The current study evaluated the effects of a series of three 3-hour sessions designed to address team building, communication skills, self-esteem, and stress management on a random sample of 51 of the 188 long-term care staff who participated. Using a retrospective pretest design, a statistically significant improvement from "then" to "today" was found for the three components of burnout: Depersonalization, Emotional Exhaustion, and Personal Accomplishment. Responses to an open-ended question about workshop effects corroborated the quantitative data, and effects noted were highly related to the defined objectives of the workshops.