Comment on: Work-related potential traumatic events and job burnout among operating room nurses: Independent effect, cumulative risk and latent class approaches.

Abstract

Burnout is used to describe the cognitive and emotional responses of practitioners to chronic emotional and interpersonal stress. Operating room nurses are a group engaged in nursing professions in special environments. Due to the long-term high-intensity and fast-paced work, professional mental and physical labour are also required, which can easily lead to job burnout of nurses (Li et al., 2021). We read with great interest a recent article in Journal of Advanced Nursing on burnout in operating room nurses and the relevance of potential traumatic events (Wang et al., 2022). The authors explored and compared the association between potential job-related traumatic events and burnout among operating room nurses under three different statistical approaches. The authors determined that sudden patient death, co-worker bullying and rejection all significantly increased nurse burnout with independent correlations, while work-related traumatic events had a cumulative effect. We believe that there are other important concomitant factors at play in addition to these three factors. Among the most important concomitant factors are organizational factors, with previous studies showing that organizational apathy, irresponsible managers, ambiguous organizational roles and organizational inconsistency are specific factors that cause burnout in operating room nurses. (Teymoori et al., 2022). As the operating room is a high-risk environment, proper management support and appreciation can make nurses more motivated and perform well. Conversely, irresponsibility of management, lack of coordination between departments and ambiguity of work assignments can cause nurses to take on extra workload, which in turn can lead to mental restlessness and inattention. Therefore, nursing staff satisfaction with management should also be considered as an important potential confounder to modulate. In addition, the inherent nature of the operating room such as closed environment, high concentration of attention, unpredictable events in complex surgery, night shift stress and various occupational hazards also contribute to nurse burnout. However, these inherent confounding factors are difficult to control for when conducting questionnaires. Common occupational hazards include physical injury (e.g. low back or knee pain from prolonged standing or sitting, X-rays, trauma from handling instruments), chemical injury (e.g. disinfectants and sterilizers) and biological injury (e.g. surgical fumes, anaesthesia exhaust gas, exposure to infectious agents). Previous research has shown that 84 percent of operating room nurses are affected by these risks (Saleh et al., 2020). Therefore, hospital management needs to take strong measures to minimize such potential risk factors. Previous theories have suggested that factors associated with job burnout include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal fulfilment. However, it may be more comprehensive and clear if the authors divide the factors to be discussed into management factors, interpersonal factors, occupational nature factors and personal factors. Hospital managers can help reduce burnout by selecting competent nursing managers, reducing associated occupational hazards, job-matching benefits and wages and creating job motivation. At the same time, operating room nurses themselves can reduce the harmful effects of burnout by enhancing their abilities in various aspects (such as improving psychological quality, enhancing interpersonal communication skills, improving their professional quality and getting enough rest). All the work (including conception and design, acquisition of data or analysis, interpretation of data, drafting the article or revising it critically) is done by me. No conflict of interest has been declared by the author. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.