JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Background:

In recent years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, awareness of the high level of stress to which healthcare professionals are subjected has increased, and research in this area has intensified. Hospital staff have historically been known to work in an environment of high emotional demands, time pressure, and workload. Furthermore, the pandemic has increased the strain under which they are due to the number of users to whom they must respond and, on many occasions, due to the lack of available resources with which they must carry out their functions. These psychosocial risks are not always well dealt with from the organization or the professionals themselves. Therefore, it is necessary to have tools to assess these psychosocial risks as well as to optimize the management of this demand from healthcare professionals. Digital health, and more specifically, mHealth, is presented as a health care modality that can contribute greatly to respond to these unmet needs.

Objective:

Objective:

: To analyze whether mHealth tools can provide value for the study and management of psychosocial risks in healthcare professionals. In addition, to advance in the requirements of these tools.

Methods:

Methods:

A Delphi study was carried out to determine the opinion of experts on the relevance of using mHealth tools to evaluate physiological indicators and psychosocial factors to diagnose occupational health and, specifically, stress and burnout in healthcare professionals. Fifty-eight experts with knowledge and experience in occupational risk prevention, psychosocial work, health-related technology, and health professionals from private and public sectors participated.

Results:

Results:

Our data suggest that today there is still controversy about the role that organizations give to Occupational Risk Prevention in general and Psychosocial Risks in particular. An adequate assessment of the levels of stress and psychosocial factors can help improve employees’ well-being. Moreover, making occupational health evaluations available to the team would positively affect employees by increasing their feeling of being taken into account by the organization. This assessment can be improved with mHealth tools that make visible and highlight quickly difficulties or problems that occur among staff and work teams. However, to achieve good adherence and participation in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) evaluations, experts consider that it is essential to ensure the privacy of professionals and to develop feelings of being supported by their supervisors.

Conclusions:

Conclusions:

For years, mHealth has been used mainly to propose intervention programs to improve occupational health. Our research highlights the usefulness of these tools for evaluating psychosocial risks as a previous and essential phase in the approach to improving the health and well-being of professionals in healthcare settings. The most urgent requirements these tools must meet are those aimed at protecting the confidentiality and privacy of measurements.