The study, led by Jana Šeblová of Charles University in Prague and colleagues within the HEROES-CZ project, was designed not to prove that the interventions work, but to find out whether they can be delivered at all in the demanding reality of a hospital. Feasibility studies of this kind are a crucial but often overlooked stage of intervention research. Before investing in a large, expensive randomized trial, investigators need to know whether busy clinicians will actually attend sessions, whether hospital administrators will cooperate, whether the content matches what staff feel they need, and where the practical friction points lie. The Czech team answered these questions using a convergent mixed-methods design, combining quantitative questionnaires with qualitative interviews and focus groups to build a rounded picture of how the pilot programmes were received.

Recruitment itself revealed something important about the state of hospital readiness. Of thirteen hospitals invited to take part, only five agreed, and participation and format selection were voluntary, shaped by each institution’s capacity. That attrition is a finding in its own right, suggesting that even well-intentioned institutions may struggle to carve out time and organizational support for staff wellbeing initiatives. In the end, three institutions hosted the individual-level intervention, a single 90-minute workshop attended by 140 health care workers, while three institutions hosted the team-level intervention, which reached 128 participants across 18 departments and was considerably more ambitious in structure.

The team-level programme began at the top, or rather just below it. Nineteen middle managers received leadership training focused on emotionally intelligent leadership, an approach grounded in the idea that a manager’s ability to recognize and regulate emotions, both their own and those of their staff, shapes the psychological climate of an entire ward. The rationale is technically straightforward: leadership behaviour is one of the strongest modifiable predictors of employee wellbeing in organizational psychology, and intervening at the manager level can cascade benefits downward without requiring every individual worker to attend a session. After the leadership training, a pre-intervention needs assessment collected responses from 238 staff members, and its results directly shaped the content of subsequent facilitated team sessions, a tailoring step the researchers highlight as a key strength of the design.

What did that needs assessment reveal? The priorities identified by health care workers themselves were working conditions, communication and managerial support. In other words, staff were not primarily asking for personal stress-management techniques; they were asking for better-functioning teams and better relationships with the people who supervise them. This aligns with a growing body of international evidence that burnout in health care is driven largely by organizational factors such as workload, autonomy, staffing and leadership quality, rather than by individual deficits in coping ability. The Czech findings suggest that when workers are genuinely asked what they need, their answers point toward structural and relational change.

The preliminary outcome data collected at baseline and follow-up paint a sobering portrait of the workforce even as the interventions were being delivered. Pooling across groups and timepoints, 19 percent of participants reported considerable psychological distress, measured with instruments such as the General Health Questionnaire, and 25 percent reported reduced wellbeing on the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. Most strikingly, 14.6 percent of participants said they had considered leaving health care work altogether. These figures, presented descriptively rather than tested for statistical significance given the pilot nature of the study, underscore why the research team considers this population a priority for intervention: a workforce in which roughly one in seven members is contemplating exit is a workforce approaching a retention crisis.

On acceptability, the news was encouraging. Both intervention formats were rated acceptable by participants. In the team-level programme, 63 percent of participants reported that the programme improved communication with their managers, 61 percent said it provided new information, and 51 percent said it improved their practical skills. Managers reported comparable benefits from their side of the programme, an important symmetry, since leadership interventions only succeed if the leaders themselves find them credible and useful. The qualitative data, drawn from 14 semi-structured interviews and focus groups involving 26 participants and analyzed with a hybrid deductive-inductive content analysis, reinforced the same themes: communication, team dynamics and managerial support emerged as central to health care worker wellbeing, validating the logic of the team-focused approach.

Implementation, however, was where reality bit. The researchers documented several barriers that any hospital hoping to replicate the programme will need to confront. Scheduling proved difficult in an environment where staff work in shifts, cover emergencies and can rarely all be freed at the same moment. The delivery timeline stretched to three to five months, well beyond the planned two months, as sessions had to be repeatedly rescheduled around clinical demands. Attendance was inconsistent, meaning some workers received only fragments of the intended programme. These are not trivial logistical hiccups; they are structural features of hospital work that any future effectiveness trial must design around, whether through shorter sessions, protected time, or integration into existing mandatory training.

The study’s conclusions are carefully calibrated. Both the individual- and team-level interventions were feasible and acceptable, and the needs assessment proved a valuable foundation for tailoring team-level content to staff priorities. But the authors are clear that scheduling, session frequency and institutional support are the key barriers to resolve before a larger-scale effectiveness evaluation can meaningfully proceed. This honesty about friction is precisely what makes feasibility research valuable: rather than reporting only the flattering acceptance statistics, the team mapped the operational terrain on which any scaled-up programme would have to survive.

The broader implications reach well beyond Czechia. Health systems worldwide are grappling with post-pandemic workforce attrition, and the Czech data, with nearly one in five workers reporting significant distress and one in seven considering exit, offer a quantified snapshot of a problem that transcends borders. The study’s central contribution is methodological and strategic: it demonstrates that team- and leader-level interventions, which remain rare compared to individual-level support, can be delivered in real hospitals and are welcomed by staff, while also showing that the path to implementation runs through the hard logistics of shift work and institutional commitment. If the planned larger effectiveness trial goes ahead, it will be built on an unusually well-documented foundation, one that treats health care worker wellbeing not as a personal responsibility to be coached, but as a property of teams, communication and leadership to be systematically improved.

Subject of Research: Wellbeing and workplace dynamics: a feasibility study of individual- and a team-focused pilot interventions among health care workers in Czechia

Article Title: Wellbeing and workplace dynamics: a feasibility study of individual- and a team-focused pilot interventions among health care workers in Czechia

Article References: Wellbeing and workplace dynamics: a feasibility study of individual- and a team-focused pilot interventions among health care workers in Czechia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15715-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15715-4

Keywords: Wellbeing, workplace, dynamics, feasibility, individual-, team-focused, pilot, interventions, health, care, workers, Czechia