Testing the correlation between occupational stress and occupational burnout among nurses working in public health institutions

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Stress at work is a major problem in the modern world in many areas of work, especially in health care. Occupational burnout of nurses represents a serious problem, not only for themselves. It also affects the quality of the health services provided to patients. OBJECTIVE is to examine the connection between occupational stress and occupational burnout among nurses working in public health institutions. METHODS: An examination was carried out to determine a connection between occupational burnout and occupational stress among nurses working in the hospital, at the departments of surgery, gynecology and emergency. For the evaluation of professional burnout among nurses, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, MBI-HSS pattern, was used, and Matteson and Ivancevich Questionnaire was used to assess occupational stress. Statistical data processing was done by the SPSS 17 software. RESULTS A total of 60 examinees were included in the study, 20 of them from the Surgery, Gynecology and Emergency department. Of these, 51 (81.7%) are female and 9 (18.3%) are male. The average age of nurses is 41.45 years, from which 40.9on Surgery; 41.8 on Emergency; 41.65 on Gynecology, and the average years of service are 17.91. Descriptive statistics for the examined variables are shown and it can be seen that there is a low level of occupational stress, i.e. the result is below 21. In the occupational burnout variable, respondents show the medium level of emotional exhaustion (M=24.05), low level depersonalization (M=3.83) and low level of lack of professional achievement subscale (M=38.71). The test results confirm the first hypothesis (H1) that with the increase of occupational stress levels, the level of occupational burnout among nurses also increases. Occupational stress correlates with occupational burnout (r=0.529, p<0.01), i.e. nurses who have higher results of occupational stress, have more occupational burnout results also. The results of the tests involving correlations between occupational burnout and occupational stress dimensions show that with the increase of occupational stress the dimension of emotional exhaustion also increases (r=0.493, p<0.01), that there is no significant correlation between occupational stress and the dimension of depersonalization, and that the dimension of occupational stress and the dimension of individual realization have significant connection (r=0.393, p=0.01). The results show that there is no statistically significant difference between departments when it comes to occupational burnout, i.e. nurses working in Surgery do not have higher results of occupational burnout than nurses working in Gynecology and Emergency F(0.679) p>0.05, and that there is no statistically significant difference between the departments in terms of occupational stress, i.e. nurses working in Surgery do not have higher occupational stress results than ones working in Gynecology and Emergency department F(0.722) p>0.05. The results do not show significant differences in the level of occupational burnout and occupational stress in relation to nurses' age and years of service. DISCUSSION and CONCLUSION: The results of the study show that with increased occupational stress occupational burnout also increases and that nurses have low levels of occupational stress, low depresonization, low level of lack of personal achievement and a medium level of emotional exhaustion. There were no significant differences in occupational burnout and occupational stress between nurses working in surgery, gynecology and emergency departments. No significant differences in occupational burnout and occupational stress were found in relation to the age and years of service of nurses working in the departments of surgery, gynecology and emergency.