Nurse Burnout and Patient Outcomes

Such increment has doubled the amount of work for nurses; exposing them to possible negative health outcomes which are most likely to influence their performance as well as the quality of services given to patients  (Bogaert, Dilles, Wouters, & Rompaey, 2014). Burnout has been conceptualized as a psychological syndrome comprising emotional exhaustion, a tendency to depersonalize client encounters, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. It is one of the results of increased work burden in the hospitals and influences the performance of medical practitioners including nurses and doctors. It undermines the care and professional attention given to clients of human service professionals such as teachers and nurses among others (Hall, Johnson, Watt, Tsipa, & O’Connor, 2016). Nurse burnout is a relatively new issue in almost every profession around the globe, a factor that can be used to explain the limited research and information about it.

Also, it was ensured that all articles found were peer-reviewed and recent (within 5 years), and that the full text was available. The search culminated into 70 articles. However, only two articles were relevant to this study and therefore, the rest were left out. The following search was conducted on several databases including Medline, PMC, and PubMed using four keywords; “burnout”, patient outcomes”, “nurse performance”, and “work burden”. The search was focused to include articles in the English language and which were published within the last five years. High levels of nurse burnout affect the capacity of nurses to perform as expected and therefore, there is great likelihood that nurses would receive poor ratings on their quality of care (Sarafis et al. As noted from the literature, burnout appears to be an important indicator for both human resource and practice leaders at all levels in hospitals to track quality of care issues.

Reducing nurse burnout could be a highly effective strategy for improving nurse-rated quality of care particularly in the contexts of a deepening nurse shortage and increasing pressure to address problems with safety and consistency of care in health systems around the world (Van Bogaert et al. In order to reduce nurse burnout, several cause factors have to be addressed as required. Patient to nurse ratios should be reasonable enough to ensure that the amount of work for nurses matches their capacity. Patients outcomes are also determined by the work environment in which nurses are working in; poor resources, poor management of human and material resources, and talent and skills management within the organisation. All these factors influence nurse burnout which in turn affects the quality of service delivered to patients. Quality Improvement Nurse knowledge and skills are very important aspects in quality service delivery among nurses.

Quality improvement is increasingly becoming an administrative mandate than an ethical standard for nurses (Hall, Johnson, Watt, Tsipa, & O’Connor, 2016). Therefore, the management has a great responsibility in managing nurses’ talents in order to keep them doing their work successfully. Studies conducted on burnout among nurses indicate that organizational stressors in the work environment are important determinants of burnout and the poor patient outcomes as well as subsequent voluntary turnover (Van Bogaert et al. There are some gaps that will require further research (Bogaert, Dilles, Wouters, & Rompaey, 2014). The causal factors for nurse burnout have been identified successfully; however, the extent of the contribution of each factor is not known. Therefore, it is not easy to point out the leading causal factor or the less significant factors. The knowledge could be useful in making priorities to address the factors (Mossburg & Dennison Himmelfarb, 2018).

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