Essay On Nurse Burnout

Medical practice is very stressful, as health care workers must respond to the patients’ needs and families very quickly. On the other hand, medical knowledge and procedures usually include limitations and uncertainties (1). Medical errors or mistakes may be harmful to a patient’s life, costly, and sometimes irreversible. Moreover, shift work, night work and long work hours are very common among health care workers (2). Burnout is a mental condition defined as the body’s response to the failure of the coping strategies that individuals typically utilize to manage stress at work (1). It is a combination of emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness. Burnout is defined as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long–term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding. Burnout symptoms include physical depletion, feelings of
Distress and dissatisfaction and have significant costs for physicians and their families nad also for patients and health care organizations as well. A study found that 92% nurses experienced moderate stress level and 8% nurses experienced high level stress due to workload, inadequate supervisor support, decreases job autonomy, less opportunities for learning, and inappropriate feedback (7).
Nurses who are stressed have higher rates of absenteeism, lower work satisfaction and are more likely to leave the organization (2, 8). Increase overload, role ambiguity and role conflict, leads to an enhancement in disengagement, exhaustion (9). Pereda-Torales et al., (2009) found that role ambiguity, lack of power, and role conflict are linked to stress among nurses (10). Many studies suggest that patient outcomes and nurse burnout are both strongly associated with low staffing levels and poor practice environments (11,12,