The Relationship between Nurses' Job Attitudes and 'Their Stress or Burnout Syndrome'

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze the stress which hospital nurses experience in their daily work and to test the relation among the intention to quit, stress factors and the burnout syndrome. Intention of the nurses to quit was measured in three categories: those who intended to continue working in the present department, those who intended to continue working in the present hospital, and those who intended to continue working as a nurse. The questionnaire survey was conducted for 976 nurses of 10 hospitals in Kyoto prefecture.
The conclusions were as follows;
The stress factors which they experienced frequently in their daily work were dissatisfaction with physicians, dissatisfaction with nursing supervisors, dissatisfaction with nursing colleagues, insufficient communications among co-workers, nursing of patients, death of patients, dissatisfaction with overload and insufficient educational chances.
The attitude toward nursing work was classified into four categories, I : those who wish to continue working in the present departments, the hospitals and as nurses, II : those who would like to change the present departments, III : those who would like to quit the departments as well as the hospitals, IV : those who would like to quit the department, hospitals and nursing position. The higher category number the more negative was the attitude to nursing work.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) scores increased in the order of I<II<III<IV. However, the stress factors scores increased in the order of I<II<III, and there was no differences between III and IV.
There were two findings in this survey, the first : as the degree of the burnout syndrome got worse, the attitude of nursing work got more negative ; second : the stress increased to a certain extent, there was a difference in the degree of the stress factors between categories IV and III.
The ways to prevent the nurses from quitting jobs were discussed. To keep nurses from quitting their jobs, it was considered quite important to take some measures when they were about to change their departments or hospitals. For the future, seminars for supervisors should be recommended as well as nurses to increase social support within the nursing community.