Nurse burnout has become a significant issue affecting the healthcare system and patient care. Burnout occurs when a nurse feels overwhelmed, emotionally drained, cynical, and loses their sense of achievement and career satisfaction over time. Prolonged states of burnout can negatively impact both nurses’ physical and mental health as well as their ability to effectively care for patients. Several studies have linked nurse burnout to worsened patient outcomes.
One of the main ways nurse burnout impacts patients is through an increased risk of medical errors. When nurses are burned out, their decision-making abilities, concentration, attention to detail and focus can become impaired. Fatigue and excessive stress make it harder for nurses to carefully complete tasks like medication administration, documentation, and treatment planning. Burned out nurses have a higher prevalence of making minor medical errors like giving the wrong dose of medication or overlooking important test results. Some studies have found the risk of a burnout nurse harming a patient through an error is over twice as high compared to non-burned out nurses.
Patient satisfaction, which is an important indicator of quality of care, tends to be lower when nurses are experiencing burnout. Burned out nurses may lack empathy, become impatient or detached with patients, and fail to adequately address patient concerns, needs and questions. When nurses are strained physically and emotionally from the negative effects of burnout, it is harder for them to deliver the compassionate, individualized care that patients want. Research shows burnout negatively impacts nurses’ professionalism at the bedside as perceived by patients.
Higher nurse burnout levels on hospital units also correlate with worse patient outcomes like higher mortality and failure to rescue rates. When nurses are under intense stress and dissatisfied in their roles, it becomes more difficult to provide vigilant observation and rapid response when patients experience health complications or deterioration. Some studies have found the risk of a patient dying increases by 7% for every additional patient assigned to a nurse. Nurse burnout may amplify the negative consequences of inadequate staffing levels and workload pressures on units.
Nurse turnover, which commonly occurs due to burnout, presents major costs and quality issues for healthcare facilities due to the time needed for new nurse orientation and training. A less experienced nursing workforce has repeatedly been tied to poorer care quality markers like infection rates, patient falls, pressure ulcers, and other complications. Many new nurses lack the intricate clinical judgment that develops over years of practice and exposure to different patient conditions and scenarios. The loss of experienced nurses through turnover has even larger negative reverberations on patient outcomes.
The deterioration of nurses’ mental and physical health from burnout also threatens patient welfare. Nurses suffering from burnout-related depression, anxiety, fatigue and medical issues will not be able to maintain the vigilance, alertness and critical thinking demanded in their roles. Personal health struggles could potentially manifest in distracted care, missed shifts due to sick calls, and other hazardous scenarios from a nurse who should be focusing on recovery instead of clinical responsibilities. Unsafe practitioner impairment is a serious threat in any healthcare occupation, but especially nursing which requires constant at-the-bedside oversight of patient conditions.
Nurse burnout represents a pervasive problem compromising the quality and safety of patient care. Through its diverse effects on the individual nurse as well as nursing workforce stability and performance, burnout serves as a major downstream risk factor predictive of poor clinical outcomes ranging from patient satisfaction to mortality. Mitigating and preventing burnout must become an urgent priority within healthcare systems to protect both nurse wellbeing and the patients who entrust their medical treatment, lives and recovery to nursing care each day. With the implementation of anti-burnout interventions, the harmful consequences of this destructive phenomenon could be significantly reduced.