Examining Burnout Among Nurses and its Relation to Turnover Rates Here s Here A widespread shortage of nurses has increased the need to maximize employee retention in the medical industry. The experience of occupational burnout has been consistently linked with nursing turnover rates, and has accordingly drawn additional attention in the field. Burnout is observable on an international level, and has been linked to negative job outcomes as well as reduced patient safety. The occurrence of burnout among nurses requires appropriate treatments. Examining Burnout Among Nurses and its Relation to Turnover Rates Turnover Rates and Burnout The need to replace exiting employees is a potential concern for any business, as time and resources spent on training and orienting new workers can quickly become a poor investment should the employee choose to leave their position. In the medical professions, there is the added concern for patient well being when considering worker turnover rates, as the need to regularly replace employees may deprive patients of being regularly cared for by experienced practitioners. There has been a shortage of nurses in recent years, making the issue of employee turnover even more pertinent for this population of medical workers. Largely due to the shortage, there has been a surge of research that is designed to better our understanding of the factors that underlie nursing turnover rates. The concept of burnout has garnered much attention as a result of these investigations and continues to be a key idea in the attempt to improve the rate of employee retention in the nursing. Nursing turnover rates are consistently linked with job dissatisfaction in many pieces of research. Accordingly, numerous potential causes of this discontent have become the focus of more recent experiments. As discussed in Leiter and Maslach’s 2009 study, the qualitative measurement of a nurse’s working experience can be expressed as a spectrum, with engagement at the positive end and burnout as the most severe negative descriptor. This continuum serves to indicate burnout, but does not describe the concept in itself. Burnout is explained as a psychological syndrome that develops as a response to various stressors in the employment environment. The experience is typically described using three characteristics including extreme exhaustion, cynicism/detachment regarding job, and a sense of ineffectiveness. The contrasting concept of engagement involves feelings of energy, effectiveness, and accomplishment. The feeling of burnout has been identified in several pieces of literature as a major player in the processes leading to job dissatisfaction and nurse turnover rate increases. Burnout as a Mediator Leiter and Maslach (2009) explored the potential role of burnout as a mediator in the relationship between job-related stressors and worker outcomes (including turnover rates). The researchers surveyed 667 Canadian nurses to gain insight into the relationship between burnout and nurses’ intentions to quit their position. The investigators found that the mediator model of burnout was significantly accurate in predicting the relationship between stressors and turnover outcomes. However, they found that only one dimension of the concept, cynicism, was a clear predictor of turnover rates (refer to Table 1 in Leiter and Maslach’s study). The preceding evidence supports the mediating role of burnout in the job stressor-turnover relationship, with an especially large portion of mediation being attributed to the cynicism that is characteristic of the syndrome. The authors offer an interesting interpretation of the findings, suggesting that exhibiting burnout-related cynicism and quitting one’s job are both characteristic of social withdrawal. The experiment was limited by the use of self-reported questionnaires, but still offers new insights into association between nurse turnover rates and burnout. International Nursing Burnout The dilemma facing healthcare administration as a result of nursing turnover rates extends to societies across the globe. A need to address nursing shortages led to a study of Japanese nurses that examined several factors as they relate to turnover rates (Suzuki et al., 2010). The investigators focused specifically on novice nurses, as they displayed the most alarming turnover rates. A two-part approach to this examination led to the conclusion that novice nurse turnover rates were significantly affected by the presence of burnout, but not in a straightforward manner. The effect was not immediately visible in the results of the initial surveys (the use of which is a limitation of this study) but over time it became apparent that burnout had started early in the nurses’ work experiences, though it would not observably manifest until later in the workers’ careers. Among additional findings, this study suggests that workplace environment is also l
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