Nursing Burnout Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Nursing Burnout - Essay Example Professionals providing healthcare services with particular emphasis on the nursing profession are known to be a group of professionals with a high potential for developing burnout (Garrosa et al, 2008). The health care services environment that the occupation of nursing functions in, is an environment that makes high demands on energy levels and different levels of competencies, poses challenges to the personal values and faith, and despite best efforts frequent loss of life of the patients. All these experiences of can contribute to burnout in a nursing professional (Ewing & Carter, 2004). Burnout among nursing professionals can severely compromise the quality of health care that health care seekers receive leading to poor outcomes, making burnout among nursing professionals an issue of serious concern to the health care service sector and society (Sahraian et al, 2008). From Ilhan et al, 2008 come the figures that it is estimated that nearly forty percent of the nursing professionals suffer from burnout, with about twenty percent of hospital nursing staff planning to give up work within a span of one year. Garrosa et al, 2008, however, provide a lower estimate of the extent of burnout among nursing professionals at twenty-five percent. Irrespective of the variance on these figures, the significant feature that stands out is the high prevalence of nursing providing support to the general belief that the nursing profession is highly susceptible to burn out. Nursing professionals function in different areas of medicine and there has been evidence to suggest that there is a variance in the prevalence of burnout among the different areas of medicine that the nursing professionals function in. Sahraian et al, 2008, in their examination of the levels of burnout in the areas of internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry and burn wards and the factors that contribute to it, show that