Nursing anxiety stress burnout

Anxiety, stress and burnout in nursing is a significant issue, which affects many nurses during their professional career (McVicar, 2003). Graduate nurses transitioning from university education to a hospital setting face additional causes of stress and new challenges at this time and require accommodating measures such as a supportive work environment (Chang & Hancock, 2003). At present the nation is experiencing a severe nursing shortage that is impacting greatly on the work conditions of nurses that remain (Chang & Hancock, 2003). In this critical appraisal stress and burnout will be defined, as will all major terms throughout this paper. The author will discuss the critical nursing shortage and describe the symptoms of stress and burnout. Causes of burnout and stress will be discussed in relation to the graduate and experienced nurse. The author will present and discuss stress and burnout prevention strategies. Throughout this essay empirical evidence will be used to demonstrate validity of concepts. A literature search was conducted using computerized databases that were searched over the time period 2003-2008 and included Academic Search Premier, psycINFO, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, EJS E-Journals Database, Professional Development Collection, Medline, Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, Health Source: Consumer Edition and Cinahl. Key words searched included burnout, nursing, anxiety, stress, shortage, graduate, and strategies.

Stress is thought to be connected to an individual’s response to specific demands, if the individual assesses the demand as beyond their resources this generates a stress response (Clancy & McVicar, 2002, as cited in McVicar, 2003). Stress responses include variation in an individual’s biochemical, physiological and behavioural processes (Billter-Koponen & Freden, 2005). According to McVicar (2003) the ability of the individual to handle the stress response is dependent on specific experiences, coping