Mindfulness as a tool for reducing stress in healthcare professionals: An umbrella review

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Health care providers (HCPs) and health care students experience a huge amount of stress due to high workloads and pressure to perform and are likely to develop anxiety, depression and burnout. OBJECTIVE: The objective was to carry out an umbrella review of systematic and narrative reviews on the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions in reducing stress and improving well-being in HCPs and health care students. METHODS: Systematic and narrative reviews that examined the impact of mindfulness-based interventions on HCPs and healthcare students' perceived stress were identified through a systematic search of three electronic databases: PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. RESULTS: Fifteen articles were included in the analysis: eleven systematic and four narrative reviews. Studies' quality varied from critically low to high. The different interventions showed positive results in reducing stress in both HCPs and students, with mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course having the major impact. CONCLUSIONS: MBSR techniques and other mindfulness based interventions resulted to be potentially effective in reducing stress. However, despite the vast amount of data collected by the studies and the promising results, several limitations affected the validity of the studies. Therefore, more research that considers the critical aspects of this field is required, in order to provide more reliable results.