Avoiding Nurse Burnout
Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels
Regardless of the job, we all deal with stress. This is universal enough that stress management is often taught as an independent job skill all it’s own; it’s not hard to find studies showing that it’s hard to be productive under certain levels of stress, and discussing the costs and benefits of reducing that stress.
But not all jobs are created equal as it relates to stress. Though any job can be stressful, some jobs have higher “baked in” levels of stress; we intuitively understand that a surgeon or a soldier might face incredibly high stress just due to the nature of their jobs. It’s not other jobs can’t be stressful; they can! But just every job has different difficulties and for some jobs the primary issue can often be stress. Among these, nursing is one of the more obvious examples.
The Outcomes of Burnout for Nurses
Nurses are especially prone to burnout. A JAMA study examining reasons nurses left their jobs in 2018 found that burnout was reported as one of the primary if not the biggest reasons they did so:
This secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data from more than 50 000 US registered nurses (representing more than 3.9 million nurses nationally) found that among nurses who reported leaving their current employment (9.5% of sample), 31.5% reported leaving because of burnout in 2018. The hospital setting and working more than 20 hours per week were associated with greater odds of burnout.
31.5% is a huge number; nearly a third of people leaving nursing positions doing so because of burnout has incredibly negative implications for everyone involved. It has negative implications for patients, who rely on nurses for their healthcare outcomes. It has negative effects for the healthcare facilities themselves and the people who continue working there; lower staffing levels mean increased stress for everyone, leading to worse working conditions and more burnout.
But the biggest impact is often on the nurses themselves. Nurses are a special group of people who chose to join in work that’s known to be stressful and difficult. To do so, they often went through years of training. Nursing isn’t just a job; it’s a career that people thoughtfully choose despite the known difficulties and dedicate themselves to. For a person who has that kind of dedication to leave their field is something that’s usually only done painfully; it’s something they do because they’ve come to a point where they feel they have no other choice.
The Ways We Can Help
We think the best starting point for fixing these issues is handing individuals back control over their lives. They, after all, tend to know better than anyone their own personal limits and needs; by letting nurses make their own choices and set their own limits, you give them the ability to avoid stress beyond what they can handle and burnout entirely. Some (but not all!) of the ways we work to do this are:
Giving back control of time
In the JAMA study linked to above, we find that scheduling and number of hours worked are a major contributor to burnout:
Compared with working less than 20 h/wk, nurses who worked more than 40 h/wk had a higher likelihood identifying burnout as a reason they left their job.
While every hour a nurse works is precious, they are still human; like everyone else, overwork weighs down on them over time. But healthcare facilities often don’t feel they have a choice except to increase hours; they have patients who need care and tend to load more hours onto existing staff to meet those needs. It’s a classic example of competing needs; often taking care of one group means costs for another.
While we at Clipboard Health are concerned about patient outcomes, we also acknowledge that not avoiding burnout leads to worse outcomes overall. A nurse who works within his or her limits might work less hours than one who doesn’t, but they also tend to stay at work. In a medical system where 1 in 5 healthcare workers have left medicine since the beginning of the pandemic, it’s clear that making the job manageable outweighs the incentive of maximizing hours from an increasingly small workforce.
Clipboard Health allows nurses have control over the hours they work and gives them them the power to keep it manageable; we feel that’s a huge first step in making nursing roles sustainable for the people who fill them.
Giving back control of schedule
If a look at the raw hours of numbers worked is important for understanding the strain on nurses, a look at the way those hours are arranged is at least as important. Nurses have families and lives beyond their work. They have events and birthdays just like everyone else, things they want to be available for that sometimes work takes away.
If your work is not just difficult but actively gets in the way of your life, it’s easy to imagine getting burned out faster. Nurses who use Clipboard Health only work the hours that make sense for them; they have complete control over what shifts they book, and for when they book them. This immediately gives them as much flexibility as they’d like, and when a nurse creates their schedule around their lives instead of shoehorning their lives in around what work allows this can have profound effects on their feelings about their work.
Giving back control of careers
Like anybody else, nurses want a better future for themselves and their families. A big part of that is moving forward in their careers. Progress is also a big part of avoiding burnout. People who are burned out tend to report that they feel stuck, that they don’t feel their work is getting them anywhere.
Part of giving nurses back the ability to move forward in their careers is flexibility. Imagine trying to go back to school or take on additional training in the nursing field as it exists today; there are those that do, but it often takes a superhuman amount of effort and dedication to take on even a little more when you are already exhausted and overworked. Giving nurses a manageable amount of hours and control over their schedules as discussed above makes a huge difference.
Another element to consider is mobility. Sometimes moving forward in your career means moving to a workplace that fits you better, or that is more helpful in finding ways for you to advance. For many nurses there just isn’t time to seek out these workplaces, but Clipboard Nurses have the ability to work at a variety of employers of their choosing. This lets them get up close and personal with a variety of workplaces, learning more about what they prefer and eventually finding a better fit.
These are just a few of the ways we are able to help, but we think (and hear back from our nurses) that even just these three ways of returning control over their lives make a big difference. With the pandemic looming on and people needing more nurses than ever, it’s incredibly important that we support nurses by giving them the flexibility they need to have a sustainable, satisfactory relationship with their own jobs.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!