Abstract
Problem Significance
Nurses represent over 30 percent of the healthcare workforce and are severely impacted by burnout. Burnout is categorized as mental and physical exhaustion from chronic workplace stress, leading to feelings of depersonalization and diminished professional achievement. Burnout in nurses leads to not only individual mental and physical health issues but also impacts the quality of patient care due to inadequate staffing, higher workforce turnover, poor job performance, and a large strain on a hospital’s organizational structure. Burnout is circular in nature and results in a dangerous nursing workforce shortage, which perpetuates burnout in professional nurses.
Analysis and Objectives
Burnout is primarily caused by enabling workforce stressors such as poor staffing levels, high turnover rate, and negative management. An additional predisposing risk factor contributing to burnout is low job self-efficacy with stress management (SESM), specifically in early career nurses. Decreasing burnout rates and mitigating the impact of burnout on early career nurses is imperative to protecting the nursing population.
Intervention (Solution) Proposal
Interventions, aimed at the seven Sacramento County hospitals, are proposed to address burnout at both the individual and organizational level. The organizational change intervention addresses enabling working environment factors such as poor staffing levels, high turnover rates, and negative management. The secondary intervention, a health education lesson plan, targets early career nurses to strengthen their SESM and build resilience.
Recommendations and Conclusions
Successful implementation of the proposed interventions will lessen the impact of burnout on current nurses and improve the resilience of the incoming workforce of nurses.