reMIND: Raising Awareness of Nurse Burnout Using an Educational Intervention

Burnout is an international occupational phenomenon that can negatively impact one’s physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. Although burnout affects all occupations, professionals working in the healthcare field are known to be at high risk for occupational burnout secondary to factors such as high-stress environments, critically ill patients, increased patient care requirements, frequent exposure to mortality, and shiftwork with long hours, among other factors. Of the subgroup of healthcare providers, it is also widely known that nurses who have a high exposure to death, such as hospice nurses, are at an even higher risk for occupational burnout. At a hospice care company in the Southeast United States where recent organizational restructuring occurred, burnout in nurses is identified as a major concern. Thus, for this Doctor of Nursing Practice project, an educational intervention was used to raise awareness of burnout among hospice nurses and to determine if an educational intervention alone could reduce burnout levels. Burnout was measured prior to the educational intervention using the Maslach Burnout Inventory Human Services Survey for Medical Personnel, and post-educational burnout was measured after one month using the same scale. Twelve nurses completed the pre-test, six nurses completed the post-test, and the results showed emotional exhaustion levels concerning burnout with older, more experienced hospice nurses. Other levels of depersonalization and personal accomplishment were not suggestive of burnout, which was contrary to the anticipated results and may have been skewed by the small sample number. Overall, although not statistically significant with this sample size, the post-intervention data supports other research findings that have shown the positive effects of mindfulness in reducing symptoms of burnout.