Section One: Literature Review
Section Two: Empirical Study
Lay Summary
Healthcare staff experience high levels of burnout and poor wellbeing.
Services need to find effective ways to support them. Job Crafting (JC) interventions
make people’s work feel more meaningful by changing work tasks, building better
relationships or changing the way they view their work to fit more with their values. It
is important to explore whether JC is effective in improving healthcare staff personal
wellbeing and burnout.
Chapter one of this thesis is a systematic literature review which includes
studies exploring the effect of JC on healthcare staff personal wellbeing and burnout.
Some of the studies were experimental delivering JC as an intervention while others
were observational measuring JC as a spontaneous employee-initiated behaviour.
The narrative synthesis found that JC was associated with better wellbeing, reduced
burnout and distress, increased happiness and better mental and physical health.
This suggests JC is a promising intervention for improving personal wellbeing,
although more high-quality research is required to confirm associations and long-
term effects.
Chapter two is an empirical research project which explored whether different
subtypes of burnout could predict who benefits from JC. A machine learning method
was used to identify 12 subtypes of burnout based on answers to a burnout
questionnaire. However, it was concluded that burnout subtype did not predict who
improved with JC. Job role or ethnicity did not predict outcomes either. Instead, the
best predictor or improvement was burnout level at the start. People who had higher
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levels of burnout at the start were more likely to get better after JC. This suggests
that services should tailor JC to people who have the most severe burnout.
Together, these chapters show that JC is beneficial for improving healthcare
staff wellbeing however more research should be done to understand more about it
and how to deliver it most effectively.
