The Resilience Collaborative 2024: Enhancing healthcare worker resilience by co-developing evidence-based solutions for scale (RECONNECTIONS)
Background
The Resilience Collaborative (TRC) is a global learning community that aims to promote healthcare worker resilience, as part of supporting their wellbeing, preventing burnout, improving quality of care in low-resource settings.
TRC was launched by the Johnson & Johnson Center for Health Worker Innovation in 2021 to support health workers and the organisations that care about them. As part of the TRC’s evolution, The George Institute for Global Health has taken on the role of the host organisation for this global community of practice since May 2023.
Aim
The goal is to advance equitable quality of care by prioritising the wellbeing and resilience of healthcare workers (HCWs) and the systems they support, through leadership development and capacity building. To advance learning and drive adoption of evidence-based strategies for health worker resilience and sustain the shared ownership and partnership, The George Institute as the host organisation has drafted an impact pathway that addresses efforts to:
- Institutionalise the TRC to support health workforce
- Equip healthcare workers by improving resilience through actionable insights
- Strategic dissemination of learning to improve agency and insight to influence policy
As part of its collaborative approach, the project has brought together two organisations with a shared vision and goal: Dimagi and Reach Digital Health, as implementation partners, and The George Institute as the host organisation and research partner.
Methodology
Projections from the World Health Organisation highlight a shortage of 18 million health workers primarily in LMICs by 20301. This is based on continuing trends of increased stress and burnout, skills shortage, decreased productivity, and retention. The George Institute considers TRC’s role as instrumental to create and sustain an enabling environment for implementing evidence-based resilience-building programs and initiatives among the CoP.
Along with HCWs, members of the CoP and implementation partners, we aim to improve the resilience and wellbeing of healthcare workers through building their resilience and leadership skills by optimising interventions for scale. The project will optimize existing interventions for learning methods toward scale; upgrade evidence toolkit, expand knowledge on WHO HealthAlert (led by partner Reach Digital Health), gather insights for adaption and scale WellMe app and develop peer community support module (led by Partner Dimagi) and disseminate knowledge and actionable insights.
Some of the activities under the project are, strengthening TRC through increasing members and improving their engagement and participation in TRC-related activities, evolving a strategy document for next five years (for TRC) through participatory exercise with members, developing new institutional partnerships for sustenance of TRC, conducting leadership and capacity building sessions for members, developing gap-maps in terms of current research undertaking and prioritisation, synthesising evidence for healthcare workers and resilience intersections, and dissemination of the version 2 of the resilience toolkit.
In addition, TRC as a COP will facilitate engagements to institutionalize TRC, contribute to building stronger leadership among HCWs and COP members, enhance agency for knowledge sharing, and foster connections toward individual resilience and policy development. We will publish the evidence generated through various activities in peer reviewed journals and develop research and policy briefs for the key stakeholders to improve the agency of HCWs to influence policies at their workplaces to advocate for their wellbeing. All the above objectives will generate insights and learning regarding healthcare worker wellbeing and the role it may play in providing equitable quality care.
The impact that TRC aims to contribute is to improve the wellbeing of healthcare workers. The strategic additions we are adopting include connecting with HCW communities to improve their resilience through provision of evidence-based tools and enhancing leadership skills and agency to lead. This pathway we believe will contribute to quality care, and positively impact the health system.
Current Status
TRC, with The George Institute as the host organisation, has entered the year 2 of its operations. As part of its evolution, TRC will continue generating evidence on the use and uptake of toolkits among healthcare workers at risk, conduct prospective studies on emerging risks and their system-wide implications, and initiate partnership pilots in low- and middle-income countries with higher burdens and access gaps.
This year's priority for the CoP is also to broaden the TRC member network and engage with existing global communities of practice, particularly those focused on the mental health and well-being of healthcare workers.
Reference
https://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA74/A74_R14-en.pdf
