The nursing profession is notorious for burnout. The place of work, scheduling, compassion fatigue and lack of support all affect the nurses’ risk of becoming burnt out. Nurses and nurse managers should be well educated on the signs of burnout in order to correct it as soon as it becomes an issue. There are many ways for nurse managers to help prevent burnout amongst their staff and there are significant benefits in reducing the burnout rate. Peery (2010, pg. 53) summarized nursing as: Nursing is a nurturing profession, and caring is an essential component of its practice. Caring for others, however, is stressful. The goal of nursing is to help people gain a higher degree of harmony within the mind, body and soul, which generates self-knowledge, self- reverence, self- healing and self-care processes while increasing diversity. This goal may be pursued through the implementation of ten carative factors, via the human-to-human caring process and caring transactions, or clinical caritas processes. This accurately displays the need for compassionate nursing without the consequences of burnout. Nurses ultimately become burnt out because they give selflessly and expect nothing in return. Nurses often give so much; they forget to take time for themselves. Burnout is a special kind of occupational stress in which is triggered by a combination of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion along with worry about ones’ own ability and the value one places on his or her work. Burnout usually does not happen acutely but happens over a period of time. Burnout builds until the person experiencing it all of a sudden feels helpless and completely unsure about their choice in occupation or choice of workplace. Burnout can lead to ... ... middle of paper ... ...th during deployment as well as in the United States Army hospitals. The deployment setting can test military nursing workers in ways that are not the same as what is typical for private citizen nursing employees who practice in traditional civilian hospitals. Providing nursing care to traumatically wounded American military personnel and enemy combatants and living in rigid circumstances are cases of some of the stresses deployed nurses suffer. Depersonalization is also a huge risk factor of burnout in military nurses. One factor that is helpful in avoiding burnout in the Army setting is that physicians, RNs, LPNs and medics all cooperate in ways that may be unusual in a private citizen hospital. In the military setting, the scope of practice increases and nurses are most often times reinforced entirely by their colleagues (Lang, Patrician and Steele, 2012).
Often time, nurses has been viewed by patients, their family members and the medical team as basic emotional care givers, pill crushers or cart pullers and not as healthcare professionals who are more interesting in health promotion, disease prevention and better patient outcomes. They also often forget the emotional, physical, mental, and caring part that is involved with the profession. And to make matters worse, nurses are continued to be viewed as a threat by doctors more than ever before especially with the opening of Nurse Practitioners programs.
In the recent past, nursing has come to the forefront as a popular career amongst students across the globe. The demand for nurses has kept increasing gradually over the years. In fact, the number of registered nurses does not meet the demand of the private and public health sector. This phenomenon has resulted in a situation where the available registered nurses have to work extra hours in order to meet the patients’ needs. With this in mind, the issue of nurse fatigue has come up as a common problem in nursing. According to the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), nurse fatigue is “a feeling of tiredness” that penetrates a persons physical, mental and emotional realms limiting their ability to function normally. Fatigue does not just involve sleepiness as has been assumed before. It involves utter exhaustion that is not easily mitigated through rest. When nurses ignore the signs of fatigue, they risk the development of chronic fatigue and other health problems that may not be easily treated. Additionally, fatigue may cause nurses to lose more time at work as they may have to be away from work for several days to treat it. The issue of nurse fatigue has permeated the nursing profession to the extent of causing errors in the work performed by nurses. Fatigue causes a decrease in a nurse’s ability to make accurate decisions for themselves and their patients. It is therefore important to find ways to curb nurse fatigue such that it is no longer a problem. Nurse fatigue is a danger to the patients, organizations and to the nurses themselves and must be mitigated adequately.
I think it is important for nurses experiencing burnout to talk to someone about it and maybe think about making a change in their workplace if possible to obtain a new challenge and help keep nursing fresh and exciting for them. I also find it interesting that as nurses, we are so prone to caring for others that we often forget or neglect to care for ourselves. Not caring for us is stressful to the body and will lead to burnout at work and also in our personal lives.
Ivancevich, Konopaske, & Matteson, 2011 defines burnout as a psychological process, brought about by unrelieved work stress that results in emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feeling of decreased accomplishment. Examples of emotional exhaustion includes; feeling drained by work, fatigue in the morning, frustrated, and do not want to work with others. Depersonalization is when a person has become emotionally hardened by their job, treat others like objects, do not care what happens to them, and feel others blame them. A low feeling of accomplishment also results from burnout. A person is unable to deal with problems effectively, identify or understand others problems, and no longer feel excited by their job. (Ivancevich et al., 2011).
Burnout is a highly unusual type of stress disorder that is essentially characterized by emotional exhaustion, lack of empathy with patients, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishments. The nature of the work that healthcare practitioners perform predisposes them to emotional exhaustion. On the other hand, the lack of empathy towards patients is caused by the nurses feeling that they are underpaid and unappreciated. Numerous researches have associated burnout with the increasing rate of nurse turnover. This paper explores the causes of burnouts in nurses as well as what can be done to prevent the them.
In the field of Nursing, the role of caring is an important, if not the most critical, aspect involved to ensure that the patient is provided with the most proficient healthcare plan possible. Jean Watson developed a series of theories involved with transpersonal relationships and their importance, along with caring, in the restorative process of the patient and healing in general. Although all of Watson 's caritas processes are crucial to the role of nurses and patient care, the fourth process is incredibly essential as it outlines the importance of the caring nurse-patient relationship. This paper serves to identify Watson 's fourth caritas process, how it can be integrated in nursing care and how it can be developed by current nursing
Burnout occurs when a person does not have effective coping skills to deal with the demands of the work they are performing; it is also said to be chronic stress caused by the high demands of a job. Burnout has three dimensions that make it up, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Vargus, 2014). Some causes include long hours, not having enough or the proper equipment, having inadequate staffing and caring for demand...
Nursing encompasses the compassionate, holistic, and virtuous care that nurses deliver to patients, families, and communities in order to assist with achieving optimal health and wellness or attaining comfort and acceptance. Compassionate care encompasses the empathy and drive to help others that the nursing profession pos...
Nurses Joe and Sarah have been working in a medical surgical unit that has been experiencing a nursing shortage, which has led to an increase in the workload. Sarah has been feeling the physical effects of the stress and feels there is a lack of management support, while Joe experiences some feelings of being overwhelmed, but tries to use it as learning experiences. Joe has developed positive methods of coping, while Sarah is quickly heading towards burnout. Implications and Conclusions The information provided in the literature has great implications for practice in many units, including the writers. It is with great hopes that the research published can be presented to the committees on the unit in hopes that some of the workloads can be decreased to help with staffing and retention rates.
Research has depicted burnout in professional fields of teaching, business, doctors, nurses, occupational therapy, dieticians, care providers, police officers and professional counselors (Chang, 2009; Cheug & Chow, 2011; Edwards & Dirette, 2010; Gingras, de Jonge, & Purdy, 2010; Law, 2010; Lee, Cho, Kissinger, & Ogle, 2010; Loo, 2004; Wilczek-Ruzyczka, 2011). According to Cordoba, Tamayo, Gonzalez, Martinez, Rosales, and Barbato (2011), high levels of stress effects much of the working population. Professional burnout has been & associated with work ability, mental health, perfectionism, and emotional regulations (Aloe, Amo, & Shanahan, 2014). In addition, professionals who are more involved with their job duties are more likely to experience burnout than those who are detached from their work (Speakes- Lewis, 2011). Burnout is often found in jobs that are demanding and within the helping professions (Romani & Ashkar, 2014; Schaufeli, Leiter, & Maslach, 2008).
Nurses want to give complete and quality care, but are unable to, due to the constant needs of their workload and inadequate staffing. They have to prioritize their patients needs based on the most critical treatments first. Then whatever time is left, they fill in what treatments they can. Some reasons that nursing treatments are missed include: too few staff, time required for the nursing intervention, poor use of existing staff resources and ineffective delegation.” (Kalisch, 2006) Many nurses become emotionally stressed and unsatisfied with their jobs. (Halm et al., 2005; Kalisch,
Jean Watson is a well-respected American nursing theorist who created the Theory on Human Caring. Watson’s concept on caring for a human being is simple, yet has much depth and meaning, and holds strong for nurses to work with compassion, wisdom, love, and caring. The Theory on Human Caring is necessary for every nurse, as it is our job to care for others in a genuine and sensitive way. The theory is extensive; its core foundation is based on nine concepts all interrelated and primarily focused on a nurse giving a patient care with compassion, wisdom, love, and caring (Watson, J., 1999). The nine essential aspects consist of: values, faith-hope, sensitivity, trust, feelings, decision-making, teaching-learning, environment, and human needs. Watson also created the Caritas Process consists of ten different ways of giving care:
Several consequences of high nursing workload have been proven to hinder the quality of patient care. Carayon and Gurses’s research (2008) indicates that heavy workload can contribute to errors, shortcuts, guideline violations, and poor communication with physicians and other providers, thus compromising the quality and safety of patient care. In addition, the research not only implies that patients may not receive proper care, but also they can experience less satisfaction with
Job burnout has been conceptualized in many different ways; however the most cited definition is “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization of others, and a feeling of reduced personal accomplishment” (Lee and Ashforth, 2009, p.743). It is a condition that is on the rise among workers today. Burnout is a type of stress response most commonly displayed by individuals who have intense contact and involvement with others during the course of their normal workday. Traditionally, burnout was seen as occurring solely within the “helping” professions such as nursing and education; however, it is now seen as a widespread issue. Originally, burnout was studied from an emotional arousal perspective; however, empirical research began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993). This review will look at the 3 major components of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Additionally, the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the relationship between burnout and stress will be reviewed. Finally, the major causes and consequences of burnout will be presented.
Burnout within healthcare has been a prevalent topic of discussion and research for numerous years. Although the link between burnout rates and nursing as a whole has been well established; most studies do not distinguish the burnout rates within the specific branches of nursing. Among these branches is psychiatric nursing, specifically forensic psychiatric nursing; where studies regarding this topic is extremely limited. According to Pompili et al. (2006), psychiatric nurses were found to have higher levels of burnout than nurses of other speciality. More research regarding psychiatric nursing burnout rates within forensic will not only expand the knowledge of the nurses and the employers regarding the key stressors that are causing these