Burnout Level and Its Associated Factors Among Critical Care Nurses: A Literature Review

Abstract

Burnout is defined as a prolonged response to ongoing interpersonal and emotional stresses at work and has three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and decreasing personal accomplishment (PA). Burnout is a condition that affects individuals working in a variety of professions, including healthcare, and is currently the subject of much national and worldwide interest. Burnout in critical care nurses can result from several different things. So, this review aimed to determine the prevalence of burnout among critical care nurses and the risk factors that affect it. The search, filtration, and selection procedures were carried out using the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram. The publications considered for the thematic review were located using Google Scholar, Science Direct, PubMed, and Wiley Online Library. Items released in English between January 2010 and August 2020 were included in the inclusion period. The search criteria were selected by assessing the abstracts before studying the full-text documents. The keywords to be included in the final analysis were burnout, critical care nurses, critical care units, and the associated factor tied to burnout as the outcome. There was a total of 264 full texts discovered from the electronic databases searched. After the duplicate articles were eliminated and the initial examination of the abstract was finished, twenty studies satisfied the criteria for inclusion. Most of the research used the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) questionnaire. The prevalence of burnout ranged widely, from 8.7% to 84.4%, according to the findings. EE was shown to have the highest levels of burnout, with DP coming in second with ranges of 38.4% to 84.0% and 26.1% to 77.0%, respectively. The range for PA, on the other hand, was 15.0% to 77.1%. The main risk factors for burnout were age, gender, marital status, having children, education level, and sociodemographic traits. While working shifts, the number of years of experience, the working environment, the nurse-to-patient ratio, workload, job discontent, and workplace conflict were all occupational characteristics associated with burnout. Burnout is a threat to the critical care nurse. It is unknown whether the factors contributing to burnout pose a significant problem for nurses.