Nurse Burnout

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliations
 Nurse Burnout

Introduction

Nurses are most valuable medical practitioners in the health care due to their role in

assessing, monitoring, and providing care. It is the nurses who spent most of the time with the

patients, checking their progress and offering the necessary patient education. In the face of the

important role of nurses, these professionals face many challenges in the contemporary complex

health care environment. Most of these problems undesirably affect service delivery as they

interfere with focus and productivity of the workers. This paper, aims to discuss nurse burnout,

including its effects and solution.

The Problem or Issue

Nurse burnout is one of the nursing issues that affect service delivery. It refers to the state

of emotional, physical as well as mental exhaustion that result from sustained job-related

stressors like strain caring for patients, pressure of fast decision making, or long working hours.

As nurses are faced with the above compounding factors, they are likely to begin feeling

detached and disengaged, the first burnout’s warning signs. Many nurses who experience cite

lack of support. Some nursing workplaces lack a culture of collaboration and teamwork, which

usually go hand-in-hand with peer bullying, lack of cooperation, sub-par communication, and

conflict. Burnout is also caused by long working hours due to staffing shortage. The nurse dearth

is associated with increasing demand for nursing staff due to the aging of baby boomer

generation as well the growing prevalence of chronic disorders.

The Setting of the Issue

The intensive care unit is associated with burnout due to the challenging daily work,

ethical issues, and severity of illness of patients (Sun et al., 2017). The critical care nurses are
susceptible to developing burnout because of involvement in morally distressing situations,

caring for families in crisis, working with advanced technology, high levels of responsibility, and

high patient acuity.

Description of Nurse Burnout

Burnout is maladaptive response to work-associated stress which leads to adverse effects

for the health care system, clinicians, and patients. Warning signs of burnout include

depersonalization, short-tempered, sleep disturbances, apathy, and emotional turmoil. Research

shows burnout affects roughly 38 percent of nurses annually and those affected report reduced

satisfaction and sense of accomplishment, increasingly negative and cynical outlook, loss of

motivation, detachment, sense of self-doubt and failure, and a feeling of helpless (Basar &

Basim, 2016).

Effect of Nurse Burnout

Nurse burnout poses serious problems to health care organizations, with recent studies

reporting that close to 63 percent of the nurses say their jobs have resulted in burnout. It can lead

to depression, sleep issues, physical and mental exhaustion, and feeling of dread about work.

Burnout can also result in lower productivity, high turnover, high rate of medication errors as

well as lower job satisfaction (Basar & Basim, 2016). An organization can also suffer as a result

of nurse burnout through such scenarios as high readmission rates, increased preventable issues,

and nursing errors.

Significance of Nurse Burnout and its Implications for Nursing Practice

On average, nurses who work shifts longer than twelve hours encounter high levels of

burn out. Burnout is a significant topic because nurses offer crucial physical and emotional

support to patients. One of the implications for nurse burnout includes lower quality of care
(Basar & Basim, 2016). Medical errors resulting from exhaustion risks patient safety and can

cause infections and premature death. Studies show that patients of nurses who experience

burnout risk surgical site infection and urinary tract infection

Solution to Nurse Burnout

The best strategy to prevent nurse burnout in the critical care unit includes improving

schedules. Whenever possible, the nursing management ought to create humane schedules for the

nurses, with the length of shifts of 8 hours maximum. Nurses should not work overtime but

advocate for schedule which let them live healthy and balanced life.
 References

Basar, U., & Basim, N. (2016). A cross‐sectional survey on consequences of nurses' burnout:

moderating role of organizational politics. Journal of advanced nursing, 72(8), 1838-

1850. doi: 10.1111/jan.12958 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jan.12958

Sun, J. W., Bai, H. Y., Li, J. H., Lin, P. Z., Zhang, H. H., & Cao, F. L. (2017). Predictors of

occupational burnout among nurses: a dominance analysis of job stressors. Journal of

clinical Nursing, 26(23-24), 4286-4292