Burnout in Nurses: Its Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments

Burnout has been rising and is only continuing to rise. Learn about the most common causes of nursing burnout and how your facility can begin to address them with proper policies and tech.

Unfortunately, with the current global pandemic, burnout in nurses is at an all-time high as now, on top of their already rigorous and stressful responsibilities, nurses now have to worry about their own health and the health of their loved ones who may be in contact with them. NurseGrid mirrored this in a survey they ran in which nurses highlighted their top three concerns in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey found that 79% of nurses feared infecting their loved ones most. Right next to that, 61% feared becoming infected themselves and 30% feared experiencing burnout symptoms in both themselves and their colleagues.

What Causes Burnout in Nurses?

High-Stress Environments

While overwork is a very common cause of burnout for many types of workers, nurses suffer the added stress of dealing with sickness and death regularly and often with people who they begin to form an emotional connection with as they treat them. Couple that with the incredibly compacted schedule nurses regularly deal with and they’re hardly given any time to grieve and decompress.

Poorly Integrated Tech

Medical technology has come a long way, but EHRs, the most used software across any medical facility for logging patient notes, hardly lend themselves well to streamlined patient care. In fact, EHR physician burnout has remained at an all-time high as EHR compatibility issues run rampant, making clinical collaboration improbable and patient care near impossible without several hundreds of logins a day.

A Lack of Nurses

Nurses have always been understaffed, working well over 12 hours a week and barely receiving time to care for their loved ones and families much less look after themselves. Before any of the COVID developments, the nursing profession was even expected to take a massive hit between now and 2030 according to studies that reported nearly 1 million nurses were about to age into retirement. And it’s not as if these numbers can be easily replenished with new nurses since the training and education necessary to enter the profession in the first place are prohibitively expensive.

How to Reduce Burnout in Nurses

Make Your Infection Protection Policies Clear

In these times, nurses’ compassionate sides are fueling their stress. They don’t want their loved ones and patients to get sick. It’s the healthcare facility’s job to address these concerns of their staff. If you have policies regarding the allocation of PPE supplies, sanitation, and social distancing, make those known and tell your nurses what changes are being made to keep infected patients safe and unable to infect others.

Invest in Proper Hardware

Don’t just speak about the importance of sanitation, show your staff you mean it by investing in equipment and hardware that make these sanitary efforts possible.

Fanless medical computers have proven to be essential in facilities looking to combat infectious diseases since their designs are optimized to limit the circulation of harmful bacteria through fans, opting instead to cool internals with heat sink technology.

If your nurses are jumping from patient room to patient room with a portable device such as a hospital tablet PC, be sure the model you invest in is ip65 certified, allowing your staff to sanitize the device as often as they need to in order to address their concerns over contracting the disease and spreading it.

Lastly, large 4K medical displays capable of sharing more information and supporting nursing scheduling apps can also help alleviate EHR issues and compacted schedules by opening up more space for crucial information to be displayed.

Burnout in Nurses Does Not Need to Be the Norm

With how common burnout has been in the healthcare space, there are too many who simply chalk up the affliction to just being the nature of the job. While overwork and emotional trauma are sure to occur in the nursing field, we must not forget that these compassionate professionals expect to face a certain level of these stressors. It is not their ill-preparedness that leads to burnout, it is inefficiencies and problems with the healthcare space. For more information on how you can employ the right hardware to address burnout, contact an expert from Cybernet today.