Self-Care Practices for Nursing Faculty to Alleviate Burnout

Drawn to the service and caring profession are compassionate and empathetic individuals. However, burnout is endangering the health of nursing faculty, nursing students, nurses, patients, and communities. Since identifying burnout, mounting efforts have increased to combat burnout symptoms. Evidence of burnout is emotional exhaustion that produces a feeling of alienation from job-related activities, resulting in a decline in job performance (Poncet et al., 2007). Holdren et al. (2015) posit that it is to be overworked until one feels lethargic, even to depletion. Therefore, burnout depletes the qualities of compassion and empathy that calls on nursing faculty when mentoring, assisting, and instructing nursing students. Nursing faculty experience burnout when there is an unsupportive work environment or an excessive workload (Stamm, 2012). Luckett (2020) identifies the nursing faculty shortage as a condition ripe for burnout. The trials of transitioning from in-person to online classes, organizational changes or requirements, student enrollment and retention, committee meetings, the challenges of preparations for clinical sites, and the responsibility of providing an innovative educational experience to students may all lead to secondary stress and an unfair demand on work-life balance for nursing faculty (Luckett, 2020). Farber et al. (2020) explain that work-life balance is vital to nursing faculty; however, increasing demands on faculty interfere with the pursuit of work-life balance and contribute to burnout. Additionally, Farber and colleagues (2020) report that nursing faculty identified burnout as a significant reason for leaving their nurse educator role, thus increasing the nursing faculty shortage. So, by engaging nursing faculty individually or as a group in self-care practices, nursing faculty can reduce their risk of developing burnout and become healthier nurse educators (Khademian et al., 2020; Small, 2019)