NCT04426318

COVID-19 and the Healthy Minds Program for Educators

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 698 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Wisconsin, Madison · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study is a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the four-week Healthy Minds Program (HMP) app Foundations training in employees of a mid-size urban school district in the United States during the summer of 2020, in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. A 3-month follow-up in the fall of 2020 will also be conducted. Participants will be recruited via email and mailed postcards, and will first complete an online screen. Eligible participants will then enter a waiting zone for between 2-days and 2-weeks before they are sent the online pre-test. Upon completion of the pre-test, participants will be assigned to condition via a simple random number generator. If assigned to the intervention (i.e., the Healthy Minds Program App), participants will receive instructions and support in downloading and activating the app. Every 7-days over the 4-week intervention period participants in both conditions will complete the same set of measures. A full battery of measures will be administered a second time post-test, following the 4-week intervention period. Three-months after post-test, a follow-up assessment will be conducted. The investigators predict that participants assigned to the intervention will demonstrate significantly reduced psychological distress after the intervention, and these decreases will persist at the 3-month follow-up. Further, it is hypothesized that baseline participant characteristics and early experience of the intervention will predict treatment adherence, study drop-out and outcomes, and that treatment engagement will moderate outcomes.

Conditions

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Psychological Stress
• Psychological Distress
• Well-being

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Healthy Minds Program Foundations Training	The HMP is a novel, smartphone-based app that provides a series of guided meditation practices on four primary constituents of well-being: Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose. The program is unique in several ways. First, all program elements are introduced with a summary of the scientific evidence supporting its constituent elements (e.g., Awareness and well-being). Second, in addition to standard sitting meditation practices found in many meditation-based behavioral interventions, the HMP offers active practices in which participants can develop the same skills but while embedding practice into activities they already do in their normal daily routine.

Timeline

• Start date: 2020-06-14
• Primary completion: 2021-01-12
• Completion: 2021-01-12
• First posted: 2020-06-11
• Last updated: 2024-09-19
• Results posted: 2022-02-10

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States