Burnout education, normatives and digital tools for European Universities
The BENDiT-EU strategic partnership believes that burnout prevention, in order to be efficient, needs to start as early as possible, during university studies. The process involves the extensive acquisition of skills and the use of tools designed to recognize burnout symptoms and monitor their evolution. The project addresses the burnout at all levels, respectively organizational, collective and individual. At the organizational level, universities need policies that may help in promoting a positive quality of life. On the collective level, professors, tutors and counselling staff in universities should be responsible for monitoring the wellbeing of medical and health allied students by offering solutions to work overload. At the individual level, students need to be able to recognize the symptoms of burnout and take advantage of the available support materials and instruments provided by their universities. The main objectives of the project are, therefore:
- raising awareness about burnout and providing on a wide scale up-to-date, evidence-based information for the identification, the prevention and the interventions for academic burnout;
- improving the wellbeing of medical and health allied professionals who are at risk of developing burnout and developing on-line tools to self-assess burnout;
- improving the skills of medical students and staff working in university support services who directly address or refer to cases of academic burnout;
- drive policy changes: providing recommendations for developing normatives and regulations designed to address and prevent academic burnout.
Within the framework of the project’s activities a set of useful tools is produced, newly developed training materials and targeted policy recommendations for addressing academic burnout in medical and health universities. More specifically, these results include:
a) a booklet with state-of-the-art information on the identification, prevention and effective developed interventions for managing academic burnout;
b) a self-screening and self-help web-based application for students;
c) experiential burnout prevention for students and academic/ administrative staff;
d) a set of recommendations for addressing the issue of academic burnout at university level, with a methodology for the adaptation of these recommendations.
VITECO takes care of the realization of the web-based application, coordinating its technical development. Moreover it supports partners in the piloting phase of the project’s results and contributes to the definition of the policy recommendations for addressing academic burnout.
