How to Prevent Nurse Burnout: 5 Tips for Facilities
When asked how they felt about going to work, 75% of nursing professionals surveyed by IntelyCare reported feeling burned out and disengaged. In the same survey, 77% of respondents reported that they were looking to change jobs, and 45% of those said they were looking to leave the nursing profession altogether. These startling nurse burnout statistics show that healthcare employees are at a breaking point.
Understanding how to prevent nurse burnout — which is broadly defined as chronic, unmanaged workplace stress — is key to improving employee retention and patient outcomes. Facility leaders looking to combat this critical issue may find it challenging to come up with long-term solutions that are meaningful to their nurses. Here are some evidence-based strategies to get your team started.
Why Is Nurse Burnout a Problem?
Nursing burnout is a serious job-related condition characterized by emotional exhaustion, lack of motivation, and feelings of frustration. These stressors contribute to reduced work efficiency and lower patient care standards.
Not only do nurse burnout and patient safety go hand-in-hand, but burnout also affects every aspect of a facility’s organization. Here are just a few examples of the effects of nurse burnout on key stakeholders
| Nurses | Negatively impacts mental and physical health
Decreases job performance Increases risk of medication and medical errors Strongly associated with staff absenteeism and attrition |
| Healthcare Businesses | Increases the operational costs of nursing facilities
Strains internal resources to constantly recruit, credential, and train new staff Impairs ability to meet government regulations Increases risk of lawsuits due to sentinel events Decreases potential revenue due to lower CMS Five-Star Quality Ratings |
| Patients | Compromises safety
Worsens outcomes Diminishes patient satisfaction |
How to Prevent Nurse Burnout: Solutions for Facilities
Burnout is a byproduct of a distressed and broken healthcare system. It’s a costly, complex problem with high-risk ramifications. One study shows that facility leaders who employ effective nurse burnout reduction programs have average turnover costs of $11,592 per nurse annually, compared to $16,736 at facilities without these programs.
Why else should facility leaders care about learning how to prevent nurse burnout, and how can they promote and implement practices that reduce caregiver strain? Here are some strategies to get your team started.
1. Understand the Primary Cause of Burnout
Nurse burnout symptoms don’t show up overnight. Psychological, work-induced stress develops over a prolonged period of time, contributing to compassion fatigue and feelings of depression among nursing professionals. Understanding that burnout is a consequence of moral distress and moral injury — even for our strongest caregivers — is essential to developing the correct solutions for prevention.
Moral distress is the psychological distress of being unable to act in a way we know is right. For example, a nurse may struggle during a poorly staffed shift if they can’t provide the quality nursing care their patients deserve. They know what to do but are unable to do so in this set of circumstances.
Moral distress can lead to moral injury, which is the long-term impact of going against your moral code to prevent, participate in, or be a bystander to something that violates your ethical principles and values. The nurse who is required to repeatedly work on an understaffed unit can develop feelings of guilt, shame, and conflict in not being able to provide nursing care to their professional standards.
If that injury isn’t addressed or resolved, it can result in burnout. Nursing facilities are in a prime position to mitigate moral distress and halt injury. When nursing facilities halt moral injury, which is systemic and structural at its core, they help prevent nurse disengagement.
Learning how to prevent nurse burnout can help facility leaders prioritize and allocate their finite resources toward solutions that work.
2. Involve Nurses in Your Solutions
The key to addressing and preventing burnout is to provide nurses a seat at the table. Nurses are natural innovators and excellent problem-solvers. They can identify their sources of stress, provide short-term and long-term solutions, and prioritize the issues that impact them and their patients the most. Nurse participation assists facilities in finding relevant and practical answers while increasing staff engagement.
Nurses have an important voice in our healthcare system. They value and commit to workplaces that listen to staff and provide a safe workplace to address needs and concerns. Both nurses and facilities want to feel proud of the services they provide to patients. Working together provides the hope and possibility of creating a workplace where patients thrive, nurses excel, and facilities succeed despite difficult or uncertain times.
3. Support Nurse-Friendly Schedules
Working long hours and inflexible shifts are often mentioned as scheduling practices leading to nurse burnout. Excessive work hours (and poor staffing ratios) can be physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting. Nurses need adequate time to recover and get proper sleep to perform at their best.
Nurses want the autonomy to self-schedule their shifts to balance and complement their personal lives. Time is the new currency workers value as much as their pay, so the more flexibility and say nurses have in their schedules, the higher their job satisfaction rates.
Healthy, happy, and fulfilled nurses increase retention. Facilities supporting nurse-friendly schedules distinguish themselves from their competitors and become an employer of choice within a small nursing community.
4. Provide Education and Training
Providing proper nursing burnout education and training can significantly decrease the risk of workplace disengagement for nursing professionals. Self-care training helps nurses reduce and manage stress in their demanding roles. In addition, training leadership on identifying early signs of moral distress and injury allows time to implement the right evidence-based practice. Nursing burnout strategies that have had demonstrated successes can stem the progression to burnout when implemented at the right time.
5. Cultivate a Positive Work Culture
Facilities brainstorming how to prevent nurse burnout should understand that providing mental wellness resources and cultivating positive work environments can go a long way. For example, staff training in resilience, meditation, yoga, and communication has been shown to promote mental well-being and decreased stress among nurses. Additionally, improvements in work environments were linked to reduced rates of burnout, plans to leave current positions, and job dissatisfaction.
The WHO defines mental health as a “state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.” It affirms that work-related mental health conditions are preventable and has developed guidelines to prevent negative work situations and cultures.
Facilities that invest in mental wellness and positive work environments for their nurses generally also invest in the health and longevity of their businesses. Implementing proactive strategies to prevent burnout takes facilities less time and cost to implement than managing the business ramifications of burnout.
Find More Ways to Improve Staff Wellness and Satisfaction
Having a better understanding of how to prevent nurse burnout puts you on your way to cultivating more effective wellness and retention resources for your team. Perhaps the best resource is having the right staffing strategy to meet shifting patient workloads. See how you can get the customized staffing support you need with our wide range of flexible staffing solutions.
IntelyCare writer Danielle Roques, BSN, RN, contributed to the writing and research for this article.