Introduction
Nurse Burnout Effects
Burnout is a serious physiological issue that affects the mental and physical health of individuals. Moreover, professional organizations and policymakers recognize that burnout among healthcare workers is an organizational issue in the industry that requires attention. Burnout is a syndrome of emotional weariness, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of success at work that causes overwhelming sensations of fatigue, exhaustion, cynical detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness. Burnout has been linked to an increase in patient safety occurrences, including medical errors, worse patient satisfaction, and lower safety and quality ratings, even though it can be challenging to establish causative linkages. This paper consists of two parts, the first one focuses on data on burnout and patient safety incidents, and the second outlines the causes and effects of this problem.
Step 1
Data on Burnout
Data Collection
The effective data that helps establish the effect of burnout on patient safety is provided by Garcia et al. (2019) in their systemic review. According to the authors, the probability of burnout affecting patient safety is 96.7% (Garcia et al., 2019). The general analysis of different studies shows a 60% association between burnout personnel and patient safety concerns. Therefore, burnout is a substantial safety risk for patients as it impairs the ability of the nursing staff to prevent errors in medical care.
Data Analysis
The system that produces the burnout effect is the healthcare environment in which the nursing staff works. The common issues causing burnout of nurses include high turnover, workloads, and shortage of staff. Moreover, in the study by Shah et al. (2018), 31.5% of nurses reported that they left their job due to experiencing burnout. Therefore, nurses not only experience burnout in many cases, but also this is an important cause of them choosing to change a workplace or field of work. The system contributing to this issue is the demanding work environment, long hours of work, lack of sleep, and improper staffing, which requires nurses to overwork (Shah et al., 2018). Evidently, there is a problem within the healthcare systems where providers do not create a safe work environment for their nurses, which leads to errors and the inability of these professionals to continue working. Thus, the performance of the system that produces this effect is poor and requires adjustment.
Apart from the evident issue of nurse burnout, there is a pattern revealing a trend where more nurses choose to change their profession due to burnout. Moreover, COVID-19 has severed this problem since nurses were the essential medical personnel taking care of COVID-19 patients (Chemali et al., 2019). Thus, the work burden has only increased for them during the pandemic. More than a third of nurses surveyed by staffing company Incredible Health indicated they intend to leave their present positions by the end of this year due to burnout from working through the pandemic.
Step 2
Cause and Effect
Cause
The data on nursing burnout shows that this problem affects a significant number of professionals. Moreover, there is a clear link between burnout and errors that can be a serious problem as they endanger patients’ health and safety. A significant threat to US health is the clinical burnout of nurses. The majority of health care workers are nurses, hence determining nursing burnout and related factors is essential to addressing its causes (Dubale et al., 2019). Burnout among medical professionals endangers US health and medical care. In 2019, there were more than 6 million nurses working in the United States, making up approximately 30% of all hospital employment (Shah et al., 2019). Nurses are an essential group of professionals with a variety of competencies, including direct patient care, illness prevention, and health promotion. The demands placed on nurses have increased along with the workloads for healthcare systems and physicians, which has a negative impact on the working conditions of nurses.
This condition, when coupled with the ongoing stress brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This may result in an unstable nurse workforce in the US for many years to come (Shah et al., 2019). One must learn more about job-related outcomes and the factors that contribute to burnout in nurses nationwide, given their diverse skill set, importance on the care team, and share of the healthcare workforce. It is well established that demanding workloads and elements of the workplace, such as low staffing ratios, a lack of communication between doctors and nurses, and a lack of organizational leadership in nurse-specific workplaces, are linked to nursing burnout (Shah et al., 2019). However, there are not many, if any, current national estimates of nursing burnout and its causes.
Effects
Historical data also shows a trend in the number of nurses affected by burnout. According to data from the 2018 NSSRN, a significant share of US nurses who left their positions in 2017 did so because of burnout (Dubale et al., 2019). Given the emotional strain and demanding work environment of caring for sick or dying patients, healthcare personnel is widely seen as being among the groups most at risk of experiencing burnout.
Earlier studies have already shown that there is a significant number of healthcare professionals who experience burnout. Additionally, it appears that the numbers have grown over time. Burnout was indicated as the cause for leaving by about 17% of nurses who left their jobs in 2007 according to data from the 2008 NSSRN, and according to our data, 31.5% of nurses quit their jobs in the prior year due to burnout, based on data from 2017-2018 (Shah et al., 2019). Despite this data, not much has changed regarding the provision of healthcare or the function of registered nurses.
There is strong evidence that some features of the workplace contribute to nursing burnout. Nurse burnout has been linked to increased workloads, a lack of leadership support, and a lack of cooperation between nurses and doctors. Magnet hospitals and other facilities with a reputation for providing high-quality nursing care have demonstrated that, in addition to increasing the number of nurses, they are changing aspects of the work environment (Montgomery et al., 2019). Examples include encouraging education, fostering good physician-nurse relationships, granting nurses more autonomy, and supporting nurse managers, which can enhance job satisfaction and reduce nurse burnout.
Measures Taken
The measure that can be used to determine if the project affects burnout rates is the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT). BAT was developed by Schaufeli et al. (2020) as an ethical tool for measuring burnout rates. BAT is based on the dialectical approach, meaning that with BAT, one can measure mood, exhaustion, cognitive capabilities, and psychosomatic complaints. In the study by Schaufeli et al. (2020), 47% of service employees had burnout on the BAT scale, which is the benchmark calculated using this tool. Thus, with this project, the change will be considered an improvement if the initial score on BAT for the nurses is above the 47% benchmark and will decrease below this percentage after the intervention.
Conclusion
Burnout is a major physiological problem that has an impact on people’s mental and physical health. Medical errors and other incidents involving patient safety have been associated with burnout. Burnout has a high chance of compromising patient safety. Due to exhaustion from battling the pandemic, more than one-third of the nurses polled said they planned to quit their current jobs by the end of the year.
References
Chemali, Z., Ezzeddine, F., Gelaye, B., Dossett, M., Salameh, J., & Bizri, M. (2019). Burnout among healthcare providers in the complex environment of the Middle East: a systematic review. BMC Public Health, 19(1). Web.
Dubale, B., Friedman, L., Chemali, Z., Denninger, J., Mehta, D., & Alem, A. (2019). Systematic review of burnout among healthcare providers in sub-Saharan Africa. BMC Public Health, 19(1). Web.
Garcia, C., Abreu, L., Ramos, J., Castro, C., Smiderle, F., Santos, J., & Bezerra, I. (2019). Influence of burnout on patient safety: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Medicina, 55(9), 553. Web.
Montgomery, A., Patrician, P., & Azuero, A. (2021). Nurse burnout syndrome and work environment impact patient safety grade. Journal of Nursing Care Quality, 37(1), 87-93. Web.
Schaufeli, W. B., Desart, S., & De Witte, H. (2020). Burnout assessment tool (BAT)-development, validity, and reliability. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(24), 9495. Web.
Shah, M., Gandrakota, N., Cimiotti, J., Ghose, N., Moore, M., & Ali, M. (2021). Prevalence of and factors associated with nurse burnout in the US. JAMA Network Open, 4(2), e2036469. Web.
