Effects Of Professional Burnout In Nursing

The United States, as well as the rest of the world, face critical shortages among health care professionals. According to Harakanen, al. et., (2013), one reason is because most health care professionals experience severe burnout from overworked and understaffed departments in healthcare facilities. Professional burnout is one of the key factors contributing to the shortfall in nursing, which in turn, causes hospitals and health organizations to offer health care workers large sums of money to stay with them (Harakanen, al. et., 2013). However, there is no indication, to date, that reveals this will alleviate the burdens placed on overworked and burned out health care workers.
According to Molly Billingsley, assistant vice president for operations support at Georgetown University Hospital, the reasons nurses are quitting is because of overwork, and all the demands they have placed on them when they work including extended working shifts (Harakanen, al. et., 2013). Harakanen (2013) also notes that nurses have to sacrifice their free or down time because of undesirable long shifts that lawyers, accountants and people in other professions don't have to in order to give optimal care to their patients.
One study suggests that the most direct cause of burnout is the heavy workload that nurses face, especially when they are understaffed (Price, 2012). According to Price (2012), the shortage of hospital nurses may be linked to impractical nurse workloads. Forty-two percent of hospital nurses face utter exhaustion, which leads to burnout that exceeds the norms of most health care workers. Job discontent among hospital workers is five times greater than the average for all U.S. workers, and one in four hospital nurses r...

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...rming evidence more easily than contradictory evidence. When calculations for drug dosages are checked, errors such as a misplaced decimal point are less likely to be found when the original calculation is reviewed, as opposed to being redone independently (Berman, 2014).
Berman (2014) argues that there are many benefits of independent checks, which simply have to be performed by the clinician. If the chance of one person making an error were five percent, the chance of two people making the same error independently, would be five percent plus another five percent totaling ten percent. Given time, money, and personnel constraints in healthcare today, independent double checks should be limited to medications with the highest risk of causing problems (e.g. heparin, insulin, chemotherapy, narcotics), or when there are complicated calculations involved (Berman, 2014).