Burnout in the Nursing Profession: Extant Knowledge and Future Directions for Research and Practice

Burnout is a psychological state resulting from prolonged psychological or emotional job stress, and is a culmination of three factors: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Due to the nature of the “people-work” they must constantly perform, along with a highly stressful and unpredictable work environment, nurses have alarmingly high rates of burnout among members of their profession. Given the importance of research on burnout to understanding the context-specific stressors and challenges of nursing, this review offers a synthesis of research published in the last decade in both nursing and communication journals, with an emphasis on discussing opportunities for further research in this area of study. As such, an overview of the extant research on the predictors, outcomes, and means of coping with and preventing burnout among nurses will be discussed. Finally, this article concludes by forwarding a series of directions for both research and practice in the fields of nursing and communication