Madeline Quinn, BSN, RN, CCRN, CPN, is a DNP student at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. Madeline participated in the university-wide “Empower Your Pitch” competition, which allows doctoral students to showcase their research, and received the “Outstanding Creativity in Research Communication” award for her project and presentation.
I have always been curious about innovative solutions to complex problems within health care. One of these complex problems is workforce wellbeing and the prevalence of burnout in our health care providers. Having the privilege of being a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University and in a well-being-focused role for my career, I chose to further this curiosity with my doctoral research.
In my project courses, I had the opportunity to explore the literature on burnout and discovered that burnout interventions needed to extend beyond individual resilience to system-level solutions to mitigate burnout within healthcare facilities. Coupling this with a letter to the editor article in a nursing critical care journal I had pinned to my bulletin board, I started to explore the integration between burnout and an overlooked population – the nurse’s family at home.
Our families are the ones that witness the stress after the long day at work and often are the ones that absorb some of the responsibilities in supporting us in the demanding career of health care. However, it begs the question, does our family fully understand the work we do within the four walls of the hospital, and do they understand burnout and the resources within the hospital to help support their health care provider? Within these questions and through a review of family understanding in the literature, Reducing Burnout via “Day in the Life” Simulation for ICU Nurses’ Families was born. I led an organization-wide effort to bridge this understanding for families and decrease burnout, known as Day in the Life- a Healthcare simulation experience for HCPs and their families.
The three things I hoped to accomplish with this experience were to decrease ICU nurse burnout, increase family understanding of the day-to-day life of pediatric health care providers, and educate loved ones about burnout. Families are the ones who see signs of burnout at home, and now we are equipping them with the tools and hospital resources to deal with it. We set up simulated ICU patients, allowing families to see what it looks like in a workplace that is normally closed off to outside visitors, and we included educational content on burnout and resources that exist at the hospital.
800 HCPs and their families attended, and 100% of ICU nurse families surveyed said they had a better understanding of what their loved one did at work, and 84% rated that they understood the resources to support the mental health of HCPs. As for the ICU nurses, we had a total of 12 paired pre- and post-surveys, measuring the three components of burnout via a validated burnout survey. Our results showed a positive trend in improving means for all components of burnout.
My goal personally and professionally is to create a sustainable health care workforce, one where we build up a culture of support and care for the superheroes who provide this compassionate care daily. In participating and winning the Outstanding Creativity in Research Award through the Empower Your Pitch competition at Johns Hopkins, I was able to share my research with others in hopes of growing this idea and bettering the health care system across the nation. We found that by integrating our nurses’ families into a “Day in the Life” experience at our pediatric hospital, we took one positive step in bridging this culture of support for our team.
If you or someone you know is interested in this concept or starting it within their health care organization, please reach out to me at [email protected] for more information.
About the Author
Madeline Quinn, BSN, RN, CCRN, CPN is Employee Experience Program Manager at a midwestern pediatric hospital. As a former Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Nurse and Clinical Nursing Educator, she is proud to use her experience in patient care to shape projects and advocacy as a member of the wellbeing team at her hospital. She enjoys time with her family, in nature, and sewing. She graduates in May 2025 with her Doctorate of Nursing Practice and Post-Masters Nursing Education Certificate from Johns Hopkins University.
