Nursing Burnout In Palliative Care

Introduction

Burnout is often considered to be a professional illness when it comes to nursing care and other healthcare professionals. Various studies have shown that burnout continues to produce a lot of adverse effects on the emotional, mental, and the physical health of the healthcare professional. This includes effects like cardiovascular disorder, physical fatigue, depression, anxiety, and loss of work motivation.   The following task analyses the concept of nursing burnout through a literature review of different nursing care environments. 

Problem and Problem Statement

Nursing burnout is a common syndrome which can eventually affect the infrastructure in the organization and may lead to lack of productivity in the workplace situation and also reduce the quality of nursing care provided in the medical condition, in the end, this will have a significant impact in the whole healthcare delivery.  In most cases, burnout is a multi-dimensional construct which will look at different parameters like depersonalization, exhaustion, and lack of feeling like one is accomplishing anything in their place of work.  This means that emotional exhaustion, burnout central stress dimension looks at the senses where the nurse will continuously feel that they are emotionally overextended. This usually comes about due to a lot of work overload and conflict between employees in the workplace.  On the other hand, there is the issue of DePersonalization which represents the interpersonal dimension of the syndrome and will often look at the point of being negative and pooling away from patients and fellow employees when the feeling of burnout occurs (Parola, Coelho, Cardoso, Sandgren, & Apóstolo, 2017)

Significance of the Problem

The issue of nursing burnout is very significant in nursing practice as it affects overall job productivity. This has dire consequences on the overall wellbeing of the nurse, patient safety, the quality of care, and the overall quality of life for the patient.  According to Rizo-Baeza et al. (2017), nursing burnout will also affect the overall turnover. According to Rizo-Baeza et al. (2017), nursing burnout will also influence the intention of a nurse to think about changing the profession.  This is because in some areas of the working lives of the nurses also contributed to the cases of burnout leading to them thinking about leaving their places of work.  Employee turnover thus is one of the significant Problem related to nursing burnout for both the nurses and the patient wellbeing.  The turnover is bound to lead to poor patient to nurse ratio that is also linked to the poor outcomes like high rates of infection and increased challenges for disabled patients.

Several studies have also taken a look at the relationship between the patient vs. nurse ratio and patient mortality, job dissatisfaction, and nursing burnout.  The exhaustion of nurse’s emotions was also very common due to the Problem of understaffing.  It is also found that there is a risk of patient mortality in addition to an increase in the chances of disabled patients getting worse during care that is linked to these nurse to patient ratios.  The increased acquired infections are also linked to burnout, in the urinary tract infection or the surgical related infection due to heavy workload, and taking care of many patients. However, burnout would be low where there is adequate staff and diseases would also reduce. 

Search Terms

Nursing Burnout, Burnout, Disability, Patient infection, and burnout, quality care

Summary of Two literature review Articles

According to the first article by Lahana et al., (2017) it looks at the healthcare section that is usually filled with the burnout syndrome. The article argues that nursing burnout is an occupational syndrome that leads to emotional and physical exhaustion. This means that more information will be required to discover the dangers of nursing burnout and ways in which this affects the delivery of healthcare.  The study thus provides an investigation into issues around burnout and factors related to the burnout syndrome among nurses while they are working with patients that are mentally challenged.  From the study, it is evident that nursing burnout is relatively high for those working in the disabled department.  The most common is the Emotion exhaustion and depersonalization. Also, various previous studies indicate that for the intellectually disabled patients collectively assess burnout across all the supporting staff, meaning they do not individualize the levels of burnout regarding the healthcare spectrum. In this regard, such comparisons can be made under the said limitations.   This shows that the study supports the fact that there are a number of interpersonal, personal, and organizational stressors that lead to the development of nursing burnout. Some of these stressors include the age; personality traits work experience, cowardice, and insecurity, low tolerance to stress, emotional instability, defense mechanisms, and self-control are some of the stressors identified as contributing to increased nurse’s burnout.

On the other hand, the article by Rizo-Baeza et al., (2017) the researcher argue that the most critical and everyday stressors regarding nursing burnout include the increased workload. Also lack of enough staff, weak bureaucracy, inability to know the results, encountering death during care, safety services, leadership styles, poor management and lack of recognition from work as some of the issues that contribute to burnout. According to Rizo-Baeza et al., (2017) the burnout syndrome looks at the psychological state of the worker in regard the chronic maladaptation that is related to the environment at work which looks at the negative self-evaluation, emotional exhaustion, and their achievement. This also includes depersonalization and professional results.  Concerning the burnout state, it will influence the employee effectiveness in the family social life, their work and will negatively impact their physical health. In the end, this leads to very server repercussions regarding costs, public health, and social, economic development.  In addition to personal factors, the researcher argues that the way nurse perform and interact with others in the workplace will be profoundly influenced by the rate of burnout. 

Gaps in the Literature related to the Problem

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Concerning the study by Lahana et al., (2017) the researcher has been able to fill the gaps related to the finding out the stressors related to burnout and the causal nature of the stressors as they have been experienced by the health professionals especially those that work with the intellectually disabled and burnout.  In this regard, the study indicates that nurses who work with intellectually disabled patients may not show an increased risk or burnout as compared to nurses that work in other areas.  The study also revealed that there are other factors related to burnout apart from the workload, and this includes issues such as the relationship with colleagues, income satisfaction, and longevity as related to emotional exhaustion. In this regard, where then nurse experienced a feeling of low-income satisfaction or poor relationship with colleagues, they would suffer from emotional exhaustion, which would eventually be depicted as burnout.  Also, Rizo-Baeza et al., (2017) provide an analysis on the relationship between the burnout and several work-related, years in palliative care, working hours, the amount of workload and the quality of life in comparison to demographic factors like parenthood, education, age, gender and living with a partner.  In the study, the researcher’s show that gender issues contributed to the rate of nursing burnout syndrome, for example, the female nurses had the common factors such as personal conflict, death and dying, escape, avoidance, accepting responsibility and the reduction of Problem solving or positive reappraisal as compared to the male nurse.  In this regard, the studies show that nursing burnout syndrome is also affected by gender and other forms of demographics. However, the study does not indicate the burnout as being discrimination, nor is it the calibration of different issues related to the nursing practice.

Research Questions

In regard to the issue of nursing burnout in palliative care the researcher aims at finding out whether the nursing burnout and factor related to the syndrome among nurses working with people that are mentally challenged was different from the burnout in the regular nursing practice.  Also the researcher will establish as to whether there is an association between the psychological, and the demographic factors and the burnout during the palliative care nursing. Lastly the study finds out the common risks risk factors and the causes of burnout related to nursing practice.

Research approach and design (methodology)

 for the research approach, the researcher is going to make use of the inductive approach, also known as inductive reasoning. During the application the researcher will first discuss observations and theories related to nursing burnout and palliative care and the proposal towards the end of the process. the researcher will the search for patterns by observing different behavior and establishing explanations of different theories on cause of burnout in palliative care.

This will be a qualitative study that will conduct a literature review on the causes and effects of nursing burnout in palliative care.  This means that the research is going to collect secondary data from various cholarly writing that is but limited to scientific articles, Journals, newspaper articles, conference proceedings, and dissertations. 

Strength and weaknesses of the approach and design

The strength of the literature review research design is that it is builts on the expanded in the existing Literature and studies in the same area of interest from various cultures, environments and social and economic settings (Li & Wang, 2018).  The literature review is also essential as methodology as it provides for a combination of both survey, search, enhancement of knowledge, reports, and other supporting tools.

The weakness of this design is that it does not consist of conducting a cross-sectional survey on the registered nurses, carers, an assistant nurse that work in healthcare centers it was evident that the study provides the first-hand experience on the issue of burnout syndrome. Also, the weaknesses are that the study will not be based on the nurse's experience, which may not reflect the effects of burnout in general nursing practices in other regions.

Research hypothesis

The researcher will try to prove that there is a relationship between nursing burnout and other factors like intellectual disability and the nurse’s social demographic factors. The second hypothesis argues that there is no relationship between nursing burnout and other factors like intellectual disability and the nurse’s social demographics.

Concepts of or independent and dependent variables

The dependent variables  will include intellectual disability, gender, education, social relations; while the independent variables will be workplace environment

Target and Accessible Population

Nurses are working in palliative care and patients with intellectual disability.

Sampling / Recruitment procedure

Sampling of the literature review will evolve around literature from nurses and patients in palliative and intellectual disability institutions. The researcher will select samples of literature from reliable medical journal search engines like Ebcohost, Cinhal among others.

Researchability and feasibility

The topic chosen by the researcher is feasible  since the issue of nursing burnout in palliative care is an area of concern in the nursing practice. There is a lot of literature and human resource and newspaper reports and articles that try to explain issues like turnover, poor quality care and increased mortality caused by nursing burnout. Meaning that the research area has massive literature to which the researcher will choose from.

Lessons learned the re-research process

The research process will entail conducting searches related to the keywords and the main subject, which is nursing burnout.

Conclusion

In this paper,  I discussed the  nursing burnout in with a special focus on nurses working in palliative care.  The paper shows that there is a lot of relevance in investigating the topic as more studies are done to ensure that health organizations acknowledge the problems of work-related issues and provide for much-needed nursing measures.  It is important to know the major causing issues  and how this can be solved from best practices around the world.