Improving Nursing Retention Rates by Reducing Burnout Capstone Project

Improving Nursing Practice by Reducing Burnout Levels

Nursing may be the most stressful of all professions, and it is not surprising that many nurses abandon their careers after experiencing the rigors of their workplace. A growing body of research clearly shows that nurses in general and those working in emergency department settings in particular are at the highest risk of any profession for experiencing professional burnout syndrome (Hamaideh & Ammouri, 2011). For instance, Hamaideh and Ammouri (2011) emphasize that, "Many nursing tasks by normal standards are distasteful, giving strong evidence to support the belief that nursing is a stressful profession and that some causes of stressors are found in different areas of work, especially in areas where multiple and complex skills are required such as emergency rooms or departments" (p. 174).

Because there is already a critical shortage of professional nurses in many Western nations, identifying opportunities to reduce burnout levels represents a valuable and important enterprise. To this end, this capstone project envisions an intervention that is specifically designed to address the antecedents of burnout among professional nurses in ways that improve their job satisfaction and reduce the adverse effects of burnout syndrome. Although the term "burnout" is not a recognized disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classifications, the condition was included in the 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) which define the condition as "problems related to life-management difficulty" and described pursuant to Z.73.0 as "burnout -- state of total exhaustion" (cited in Carod-Artal & Vasquez-Cabrera, 2013, p. 23).

The definition provided by one of the originators of the concept, Maslach, "Burnout is a multidimensional syndrome which is revealed with feelings of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment; afflicting professionals of various fields" (cited in Nikolaos, 2012, p. 172). In order to improve anything, though, if must first of course be measured. For this purpose, The Maslach burnout inventory (MBI) provides a useful measure of the three dimensions of burnout. This self-administered instrument uses a series of Likert-type scale questions concerning job satisfaction, fatigue, feelings of job competence, and feelings about the recipients of professional healthcare services to evaluate the adverse effects of burnout with respect to its constituent components (Karwowski, 2006). The individual components of burnout are shown in Table 1 below.

Table 1

Definition of Individual Components of Burnout

Component

Definition

Emotional Exhaustion

This component refers to…