Nurses’ Widespread Job Dissatisfaction, Burnout, And Frustration With Health Benefits Signal Problems For Patient Care

By Matthew McHugh, Ann Kutney-Lee, Jeannie P. Cimiotti, Douglas Sloane, Linda Aiken. Health Affairs, 2011

788 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Job dissatisfaction among nurses contributes to costly labor disputes, turnover, and risk to patients. Examining survey data from 95,499 nurses, we found much higher job dissatisfaction and burnout among nurses who were directly caring for patients in hospitals and nursing homes than among nurses working in other jobs or settings, such as the pharmaceutical industry. Strikingly, nurses are particularly dissatisfied with their health benefits, which highlights the need for a benefits review to make nurses’ benefits more comparable to those of other white-collar employees. Patient satisfaction levels are lower in hospitals with more nurses who are dissatisfied or burned out—a finding that signals problems with quality of care. Improving nurses’ working conditions may improve both nurses’ and patients’ satisfaction as well as the quality of care.

Subfields: Emergency Medical Services, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63a51b9e91c8ad8688a285db78d67958caf19d77

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In Emergency Medical Services

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Nurse staffing, burnout, and health care-associated infection. (2012, neutral): “31 Some evidence suggests that hospital nurses experience high levels of job-related burnout, 32–36 but whether and to what extent higher burnout rates affect clinical outcomes has gone largely unexplored to date.”
Factors that influence the development of compassion fatigue, burnout, and compassion satisfaction in emergency department nurses. (2015, background): “Nurses who are experiencing CF and burnout are too exhausted to provide levels of care that help patients feel satisfied (Boyle, 2011; McHugh et al., 2011).”
Burnout Among Health Care Professionals: A Call to Explore and Address This Underrecognized Threat to Safe, High-Quality Care (2017, background): “Additional studies have reported an inverse relationship between nurse job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion and patient satisfaction ratings across a variety of domains [11,25,26].”