Can We Ever Overcome Burnout in Nursing?
Reality shock redux.
It seems to me that we’ve been talking about burnout about as long as I’ve been in nursing, and that’s over 40 years. In 1974, Marlene Kramer’s book Reality Shock: Why Nurses Leave Nursing reported on how nurses’ dissatisfaction with their inability to practice as they were taught was a major factor in their leaving the profession. (Here’s AJN’s 1975 review of the book.) In the 1980s, it was the downsizing of staff that caused many to leave (see the February editorial for my own experience). In the last decade, as health system changes and staffing (again) engendered moral distress and burnout among members, nursing organizations sought ways to mitigate distress among nurses.
Burnout’s persistence as an issue.
But the issue persists and arguably has gotten worse, with increasingly alarming reports of high levels of burnout—between 34% and 54% physicians and nurses report symptoms—and suicides.
To address the problem, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NAM) established a 17-member committee to review the […]