Content area
Full text
abstract
Burnout is becoming increasingly common in the health care profession. Indicators of burnout include feeling overworked, frustrated, emotionally drained, and less productive. Burnout leads to interpersonal conflicts, physical symptoms, compulsive activities, decreased productivity, and negative emotions. Individuals who experience burnout believe they cannot change their situation. Job burnout can be overcome after the cause is pinpointed. To revitalize a career and move away from a burnout state, individuals need to change their thought processes and viewpoints about the people and things that may be contributing to their burnout.
Nurses frequently feel overworked and overwhelmed by competing demands on their time. However, nurses who find themselves constantly frustrated, emotionally drained, and less productive, are becoming cynical, or feel that they are shifting from doing a great job to just getting by should recognize these feelings as danger signals. Nurses whose lives become increasingly more stressful and who feel that they cannot change anything may be headed for or experiencing burnout.
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
According to Wright (2003), nurses seem to surfer from stress and burnout more than other comparable groups. Raiger (2005) described burnout as a unique type of stress syndrome that pervasively affects the nursing profession. Burnout in nursing is a global phenomenon. Recent global studies of burnout in nurses include Aiken et al. (2001), who studied the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, and Germany; Demir, Ulusoy, and Ulusoy (2003), who studied Turkey; Cilliers (2003), who studied South Africa; Chen and McMurray (2001), who studied Taiwan; and Worrall-Carter and Snell (2003), who studied Australia.
Burnout affects nurses in all areas of the world and in every area of practice. Aiken et al. (2001) reported that 40% of hospital nurses have burnout levels that exceed the norms for healthcare workers. Burnout occurs in all areas of clinical practice from intensive care units (Chen & McMurray, 2001) to mental health units (Jenkins & Elliott, 2004). Aiken et al. (2001) found that job dissatisfaction among hospital nurses is four times greater than the average for all U.S. workers. A National Institutes of Health study (2002) reported that 43% of nurses who cited job burnout planned on leaving their job within the next year.
Burnout is a phenomenon that also occurs for nursing professionals in academia and...