In hospitals around the world, nurses are reporting feelings of burnout and dissatisfaction with their jobs, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research.
In a study of 100,000 nurses, 20% to 60% of participants reported symptoms of burnout. The analysis, published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care, included data from nurses in more than 1400 hospitals in 9 countries (China, South Korea, Thailand, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and determined the effect of hospital work environments on hospital outcomes.
Using measurements developed by Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, director of the Center of Health Outcomes and Policy Research at Penn Nursing, and colleagues, researchers determined nurses’ responses to questions regarding nurse manager ability and leadership, nurse participation in hospital affairs, nurse-physician relations, nursing foundations for quality of care, and staffing-resource adequacy.
According to Dr Aiken, lead author, “The percentage of nurses reporting high burnout was over a third in most countries and decidedly higher in South Korea and Japan, near 60% in both countries. Job dissatisfaction varied from 17% in Germany to around a third of nurses in most countries and a high of 60% dissatisfied in Japan. Almost half of nurses in all countries, except in Germany, and many more than half of the nurses in a few of the countries, lacked confidence that patients could manage their care after discharge.”
Hospitals with better work environments resulted in:
Hospitals with poorer work environments presented a higher percentage of nurses who believed patients were not prepared for discharge (between 22% and 85%).
“How well nurses are faring in their jobs has been found to be a barometer of how well patients in those same hospitals are faring,” said Dr Aiken. “In all countries, more than 1 in 10 nurses report that care is either fair or poor, and in 3 of 4 Asian countries studied, nurses’ ratings of fair/poor care are much more frequent.”
According to Dr Aiken and colleagues, the ability to improve the nursing workforce and quality of care lies with hospital leaders and policy makers. This can be achieved by:
“Increased attention to improving work environments might be associated with substantial gains in stabilizing the global nurse workforce while also improving quality of hospital care throughout the world,” said Dr Aiken.
Source: University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
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