Abstract
Background
Nurses, midwives and paramedics are the largest collective group of clinical staff in the NHS and have some of the highest prevalence of psychological ill-health. Existing literature tends to be profession-specific and focused on individual interventions that place responsibility for good psychological health with nurses, midwives and paramedics themselves.
Aim
To improve understanding of how, why and in what contexts nurses, midwives and paramedics experience work-related psychological ill-health; and determine which high-quality interventions can be implemented to minimise psychological ill-health in these professions.
Methods
Realist synthesis methodology consistent with RAMESES reporting guidelines.
Data sources
First round database searching in MEDLINE ALL (via Ovid), CINAHL (via EBSCO) and HMIC (via Ovid), was undertaken between February-March 2021, followed by supplementary searching strategies (e.g., hand searching, expert solicitation of key papers). Reverse chronology screening was applied, aimed at retaining 30 relevant papers in each profession. Round two database searches (December 2021) targeted COVID-19-specific literature and literature reviews. No date limits were applied.
Results
We built on 7 key reports and included 75 papers in the first round (26 Nursing, 26 Midwifery, 23 Paramedic) plus 44 expert solicitation papers, 29 literature reviews and 49 COVID-19 focused articles in the second round. Through the realist synthesis we surfaced 14 key tensions in the literature and identified five key findings, supported by 26 Context Mechanism and Outcome configurations (CMOcs). The key findings identified that: 1) Interventions are fragmented, individual-focused and insufficiently recognise cumulative chronic stressors; 2) It is difficult to promote staff psychological wellness where there is a blame culture; 3) The needs of the system often override staff wellbeing at work (‘serve & sacrifice’); 4) There are unintended personal costs of upholding and implementing values at work; and 5) It is challenging to design, identify and implement interventions to work optimally for diverse staff groups with diverse and interacting stressors.
Conclusions
Our realist synthesis strongly suggests the need to improve the systemic working conditions and the working lives of nurses, midwives and paramedics to improve their psychological wellbeing. Individual, one-off psychological interventions are unlikely to succeed alone. Psychological ill-health is highly prevalent in these staff groups (and can be chronic and cumulative as well as acute) and should be anticipated and prepared for, indeed normalised and expected. Healthcare organisations need to: 1) rebalance the working environment to enable healthcare professionals to recover and thrive; 2) invest in multi-level systems approaches to promoting staff psychological wellbeing; and use an organisational diagnostic framework such as the NHS England and NHS Improvement Health and Wellbeing framework to self-assess and implement a systems approach to staff wellbeing.
Future work
Future research should implement, refine and evaluate systemic interventional strategies. Interventions and evaluations should be co-designed with frontline staff and staff experts by experience, and tailored where possible to local, organisational and workforce needs.
Limitations
The literature was not equivalent in size and quality across the three professions and we did not carry out citation searches using hand searching and stakeholder / expert suggestions to augment our sample.