Background: There is a growing interest in the psychosocial work environment of health care staff since they are at high risk for burnout, role conflict and job dissatisfaction. Burnout, as a type of prolonged response to chronic job-related stressors, has a special significance in health care where staff experience both psychological, emotional and physical stress. Burnout and the other negative aspects of the job of health care staff have major behavioural and health implications.
Aims & Objective: The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of burnout among nursing staff in a military hospital, estimate the level of burnout among those nurses working on inpatient wards and outpatient clinics and to identify the risk factors of burnout that could be linked to personal and working characteristics associated with the syndrome.
Materials and Methods: A cross sectional descriptive study has been carried out including all nurses working in North West Armed Force Hospital (NWAFH). An anonymous questionnaires were used for data collection including presence of burnut as a dependent variable and age, gender, nationality, marital status, income, allocation, medical Hx, psychiatric Hx as independent variables. Head nurses of each ward and each clinic had been personally informed about the aims of this study and had been asked to distribute a questionnaire among the staff nurses and collect them after completion. A total of 200 questionnaires had been distributed to the medical nurse staff working in the clinics and wards during October 2012. The questionnaire is divided into two parts: socio-demographic with job characteristics of the population and MBI questionnaire to estimate the job burnout level.
Results: The response rates of returned questionnaires from inpatient and outpatient nurses were 79%. 34.8 % of our sample was aged between 35-44 years. 87.9% of all nurses were females. A 55.1 % of our samples were married. A 56.4% of the entire sample was having Philippine nationality. The overall result showed that 75.9% of our sample is having burnout, mainly inpatient staff (P-value 0.03). There are no statistical differences in having high burnout score based on gender, salary or having positive medical or psychiatric illness.
Conclusion: In North West Armed Force Hospital (NWAFH), the overall prevalence of burnout among nurses was high (75.9%), and working as inpatient nurse increase the risk of developing burnout more than working in outpatient clinic.
Key words: Burnout; Nurses; Military; Saudi Arabia
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