Introduction and Background: Burnout is a syndrome that many health professionals are experiencing. It involves a state of emotional and mental exhaustion and professional fatigue that can impact the personal lives of these individuals leading to anxiety, depression, and discontentment. The impact may go further in the healthcare setting and lead to a decrease in patient safety and diminished quality of care for patients.
Purpose: The purpose of this literature review is to systematically and critically appraise current literature to examine the associations between nurse burnout rates and poor patient outcomes.
Literature Review: A total of thirteen articles, one literature review, and one meta-analysis were included in this review. Databases that were used to obtain these articles included PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and CINAHL.
Findings: The related factors that were associated with nurse burnout included a high-stress work environment, lack of support, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and inadequate staffing. In situations where the staff was experiencing high levels of burnout, there was a correlation with decreased patient and family satisfaction and an increase in adverse events such as medication errors and missed care.
Conclusion: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, articles published within the past years have consisted of data collection through questionnaires and online surveys to limit the transmission of the virus. This technique could have led to a bias gap within the literature collected considering the lack of validity questionnaires yield due to the collection of information without further explanation. Despite this limitation, the data results still exposed that the presence of burnout among health professionals is associated with worsening patient safety. High levels of burnout are related to external factors, such as high workload, long hours, and interpersonal relationships. Avoiding professional exhaustion is an important strategy for improving patient safety.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:asrf-1807 |
| Date | 07 April 2022 |
| Creators | Downing, Amanda, Lockamy, Brooke, Smith, Sierra L |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Appalachian Student Research Forum & Jay S. Boland Undergraduate Research Symposium |
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