Citation

Melnyk BM. Worldviews Evid. Based Nurs. 2020; 17(1): 2-5.

Affiliation

College of Nursing, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Sigma Theta Tau International, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/wvn.12416

PMID

32017437

Abstract

The combination of nurse, clinician and learner burnout, depression and suicide is currently a public health epidemic throughout the world that not only threatens the well‐being of health professionals, but is a major threat to healthcare quality and safety (Dzau, Kirch & Nasca, 2018). Burnout, which is comprised of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment (Fred & Scheid, 2018), affects approximately half of all nurses, physicians and other clinicians (Shanafelt et al., 2015). Healthcare clinicians suffering from burnout tend to experience headaches, insomnia, tension, anger, fatigue, impaired memory, decreased attention, thoughts of quitting work, drug and alcohol use, and suicide. Causes of burnout include: increased clinical demands, inadequate staffing patterns, decreased control, poorly functioning teams, role ambiguity, moral distress, reimbursement issues, decreased time with patients, difficulty balancing personal and professional lives, inefficiency of the electronic medical record and isolation. Burnout also contributes to increased medical errors, patient dissatisfaction, high turnover rates and substantial financial losses (Hall, Johnson, Watt, Tsipa, & O’Connor, 2016; Pereira‐Lima et al., 2019; Willard‐Grace et al., 2019). For every newly licensed registered nurse who leaves their job in the first year of practice, it costs the institution up to three times the nurse’s annual salary when factoring in the costs associated with recruitment, training and orientation (Unruh & Zhang, 2014). For every physician who leaves a practice, lost revenue is estimated to range from $500,000 to $1,000,000 (Fred & Scheid, 2018).

Depression also is on the rise in nurses and physicians with findings from recent studies indicating that depression rates range from 25% to 43% (Kuhn & Flanagan, 2017; Maharaj, Lees, & Lal, 2018; Mata et al., 2015; Melnyk, Orsolini, et al., 2018). Findings from a recent study by Melnyk, Orsolini, et al. (2018) with 1,790 practicing nurses from 19 healthcare systems across the United States indicated that depression affected a third of the sample and was the leading cause of medical errors ...

Language: en