Abigail G. GH CHE'23, Project: SVYM Palliative Care study on Burnout in Care Providers

This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work with SVYM at the palliative care center. Palliative care focuses on providing a holistic approach to caregiving for terminal illnesses by meeting the physical, psychological, economic, social and spiritual needs of each patient. SVYM provides home based care and institutional care in Mysore, and home based care in Hassan and Dharwad. I was grateful to have multiple chances to spend the day at the Mysore palliative care center interacting with the workers and seeing their day to day interactions with patients. Amazingly, I also spent one day with the home based care team visiting patients’ homes. I got to see first hand how much of an impact the SVYM team is making on not just the patients but their families.

My project focused on measuring burnout among the health care providers in palliative care. This involved working with the palliative care team at SVYM to survey all the health care professionals and assess their burnout levels using the Maslach Burnout Inventory. I then analyzed my results and concluded that workers in both institutional and home based care were most at risk for high levels of emotional exhaustion and low levels of personal accomplishment. Workplace has significant association with burnout symptoms, which is something that can be addressed while providing group interventions.
Overall, this experience has been so meaningful to me. I have grown personally, educationally, and culturally. I want to thank everyone involved for making this experience so life changing.