How 15 Minutes Uninterrupted Use of Recharge Room Reduce Level of Stress in ACU

How will 15 Minutes Uninterrupted Use of a Recharge Room Reduce the Level of Stress in an Acute Care Unit?
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How will 15 Minutes Uninterrupted Use of a Recharge Room Reduce the Level of Stress in an Acute Care Unit?
Leadership Project
My leadership project focused on reducing stress levels among healthcare staff working in an acute medical-surgical unit. Specifically, the project involved exploring whether the utilization of a recharge room for 15-minutes without interruption can reduce the stress level of the unit’s staff. Recharge rooms provide a healing environment for healthcare staff by offering an immersive environment where they can relax, address unresolved thoughts, and relieve stress (Putrino et al., 2020).
The project was implemented at University Health System in San Antonio, Texas. This healthcare organization is the third largest public health system in Texas and serves a large number of patients. I realized that the healthcare staff, especially those working in the medical-surgical unit, are constantly stressed. The staff at the hospital have a high workload which leaves them with little time for rest, and this contributes to high burnout. The high-stress levels are associated with a high workload and the nature of work which can be quite draining sometimes. I noticed that the staff had a high staff-to-patient level, which increased their workload. This observation is similar to the one shared by Wei et al. (2018), who established, through a systematic review, that the stress levels of healthcare staff are influenced by the number of patients they serve and the heavy workload. This observation led me to discover the need for an intervention that would help alleviate the stress and burnout among acute medical-surgical unit staff.
The chosen intervention was based latest research on stress reduction. Putrino et al. (2020) state that healthcare workers experience high-stress levels due to their work. The stress levels have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions on the healthcare system. These high-stress levels necessitated a look into viable stress reduction interventions. Putrino et al. (2020) found that exposure to a recharge room for 15 minutes either during, before, or after a shift reduced the stress levels of healthcare workers significantly. I shared this information with my preceptor, and we agreed that a project exploring whether a 15-minute uninterrupted utilization of the recharge room can reduce stress levels would benefit the hospital’s workforce.
Measuring Project Outcomes
Establishing and measuring project outcomes is important because it makes it easy to measure the success of the project and identify areas of improvement. Since this project’s focus was on the reduction of stress among healthcare staff, the outcomes were also focused on stress reduction. Specifically, the primary outcome was the perceived stress among medical-surgical staff. Perceived stress was measured in terms of the participants' self-reported levels of stress. According to Dutton and Kozachik (2020), the perceived stress of healthcare staff can be measured using an outcome meas...