Root Causes of Nurse Burnout

Root Causes of Nurse Burnout

Why does nurse burnout happen? Nurse burnout has various factors that play into a nurses life. People may develop issues due to the constant exposure to unpleasant, traumatic and stressful events ( Mohsin, Shahed, & Sohail, 2017). As stated by (Mohsin et al., 2017) nurses are burdened with workload and have to attend to many patients during their duty hours. Dealing with the emotional stress of seeing patients dying, dealing with patients, families and doctors, not being appreciated, and figuring out solutions repetitively each day gets exhausting. The weight of all of that certainly gets to the nurses overtime, especially when there are patients who use and abuse the system. This leaves the nurse feeling useless and having the nurse at the end of the day leave their patients with the lasting effects of emotional exhaustion.

Emotional exhaustion can stem into negative feelings for oneself and their job. With having emotional exhaustion, this will start showing in the quality of care the nurse gives and what the patient receives. Although the patients will be affected by this tremendously, so will the people working in that environment with the nurse. This newly developed attitude will negatively impact the work environment and how the nurse proceeds with her day to day activities. These maladaptations include a lack of emotional abilities such as awareness and emotional clarity, rejecting responses, high emotional interference of negative emotions in the performance of goal- oriented behaviors, and the inability to control behaviors in the face of emotional distress (Blanco-Donoso, Garrosa, Demerouti, & Moreno- Jimenez, 2017). Along with emotional exhaustion, a characteristic flaw that will start to develop is depersonalization. Depersonalization is what happens when a nurse becomes numb to a situation. They will eventually start to work like robots, essentially. These people will work to work and not work to provide quality care to their patients. They also fail to recognize the “humanness” aspect of the job. Since depersonalization causes low self worth and low personal achievement, these types of situations may arise as another component that may lead up to emotional exhaustion in a nurse while working.

A way that burnout can be measured is buy MBI which stands for Maslach Burnout Inventory. What MBI does is measure three components which are: EE, CF, & OB. If the score was higher on the subjects of EE and CF, then that would mean it correlated with higher degrees of burnout (Molavynejad, Babazadeh, Bereihi, & Cheraghian, 2019). Also, the lower scores related to burnout was OB (Molavynejad, Babazadeh, Bereihi, & Cheraghian, 2019). The MBI is very useful because it serves a good purpose of showing good measurement of burnout for many years, as well as reliability and validity (Ilic, Todorovic, Jovanovic, & Ilic, (2017).