Nursing is an emotionally, physically, and spiritually involving career. Practice nurses face many challenges as they deliver nursing services on a daily basis. These challenges include burnout and stress. An immediate impact of stress and burnout is loss of morale, low job satisfaction and absenteeism. Stress and burnout leads to negative nursing outcomes thereby reducing the quality of nursing services. This paper evaluates stress and burnout among Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) Nurses.
NICU nurses work in a challenging situation where they witness the physical suffering of babies and emotional suffering in parents and family members. Witnessing suffering can cause compassion fatigue which is a form of secondary post traumatic stress disorder. Compassion fatigue is characterized by physical, spiritual, and emotional exhaustion. Additionally, staffing challenges, scrutiny from hospital administrators and budgetary constraints cause frustration and stress among NICU nurses. Burnout refers to fatigue, exhaustion and loss of interest in work caused by prolonged stress and overwork. Burnout is a response to workplace stressors and challenges. In the NICU setting, burnout leads to low morale, reduced sense of personal and team accomplishments, emotional distress, decreased productivity, psychological illnesses, and high turnover rates among nurses.
NICU nurse leaders and hospital administrators have a duty of reducing stress and burnout among nurses. This can be done by promoting job satisfaction, offering emotional support and self-care (Braithwaite, 2008). In addition, improving the quality of services offered in the NICU setting would improve nursing outcomes and reduce compassion fatigue. Reducing stress and fatigue leads to high rates of job satisfaction, better retention rates, and effective team work among NICU nurses. The patients and their families will benefit through improved services delivered by motivated nurses.
References
Braithwaite, M. (2008). Nurse burnout and stress in the NICU. Advances in neonatal care, 8(6),
343-347.
