(PS9-43) Supervisor and Agency Strategies to Address Burnout: Insights from Community Mental Health Providers in Washington State

Abstract Text:

Introduction: Burnout among community mental health (CMH) providers is alarmingly high and was likely exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is critical to address CMH provider burnout due to its association to worse client care, poor provider well-being, and staff turnover. CMH supervisors are in a unique position to intervene, given that supportive clinical supervision has been associated with reduced burnout and increased job satisfaction. However, there remains little guidance on specific burnout strategies supervisors and agencies can implement with providers to reduce provider burnout. This qualitative study elicited from Washington state CMH providers strategies they felt would be helpful for their supervisors or agency to enact in order to reduce CMH provider burnout.


Method: 197 CMH providers participating in the 2022-2023 training cycle of a state-funded CBT training initiative completed a Qualtrics survey on what their supervisors or agencies could do to help reduce burnout. Participants could free-list up to 15 solutions. Two coders (an undergraduate and PhD student) first reviewed a subset of the responses to create an initial codebook. Coders used the codebook to independently code specific burnout solutions, making revisions to the codebook as necessary. Coders met weekly to resolve discrepancies in an open discussion process. Specific coded burnout solutions were then grouped into overarching categories.

Result: Thematic analysis revealed 33 specific coded burnout solutions that fell into 6 categories: 1) Clients (e.g., reducing caseload size), 2) Structural support (e.g., having more vacation days), 3) Emotional Support (e.g., supervisors checking in on providers’ well-being), 4) Other Supervision (e.g., having an engaged supervisor), 5) Team (e.g., morale building activities with colleagues), and 6) Self-care (e.g., supervisors encouraging providers to engage in self-care activities at home or at work). The top 3 most endorsed specific burnout solutions across categories were: 1) Time off (endorsed by 26.9% of participants; including encouragement to take agency-provided vacation days), 2) Self-care – general (16.2%; i.e., encouraging providers to engage in physical and emotional self-care activities, like exercise, meditation, etc.), and 3) Supervision sessions (12.7%; i.e., having regular or additional supervision sessions).


Discussion: Providers most desire burnout solutions that directly address their well-being or opportunities to meet with their supervisors, in contrast to mitigating factors related to the job demands themselves that contribute to burnout, such as reducing caseload size. Future research should identify which solutions are most feasible for supervisors or agencies to enact, which may be dependent on individual supervisors, agencies or location given available time and resources. Eliciting solutions for burnout from providers themselves ensures that solutions are most relevant and thus impactful for addressing CMH provider burnout. Additionally, specifically focusing on solutions that supervisors or agencies can enact leverages existing supports in CMH centers (e.g., supervisors), which helps promote sustained change.