Medical Safety & Global Health
Open Access

The Impact of Nursing Fatigue on Patient Safety: A Perception on Nursing Burnout

Ben Guhin^{* *}Correspondence: Ben Guhin, Department of Nursing, Al Ghurair University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Email:

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Description

Nursing shift workers that are more burned out perform less patient safety management. Hence, in order to improve safety and lessen shiftwork nurses' burnout, both individual efforts and an effective organizational support structure are required.

There are numerous factors in the medical industry that can reduce patient safety. Nurse burnout is a significant factor in this. This is a global problem that results in hundreds of thousands of deaths a year and billions of dollars spent trying to fix new issues. With the billions of prescriptions that are completed annually, the average number of errors in the medical industry is one error in every twenty filled prescriptions. And with these mistakes, not only is there a chance that a prescription will be incorrect, but there is also a $3.5 billion price tag that comes along with it, which is the amount that people pay each year for legal fees and additional days that patients must stay in hospitals due to hospital errors. An estimated 250,000 of these patients die each year in the United States alone as a result of medical negligence or burnout-related declines in patient safety. This high mortality rate is the third largest cause of death in the nation because errors will occur when employees are overworked and under constant stress.

Due to staff burnout and overwork, particularly in the recent years during the pandemic, these errors and other factors have resulted in a substantial number of hospital deaths as a result of a drop in patient safety.

Over half of healthcare professionals, including nurses and other doctors, experience burnout on a regular basis. The term "burnout" was first used by Herbert Freudenberger, a free clinic worker who over time described some of the impacts he had observed, including "emotional depletion and concomitant psychosomatic symptoms, excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources." These signs are frequently observed nowadays in hospital settings when nurses feel overworked. People shouldn't feel this way, especially those who have to care for patients and those who may be in really serious conditions. An assessment scale was developed to gauge the level of burnout in the healthcare industry using what Freudenberger described. This scale, known as Maslach's scale, evaluates six factors: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. Each of these fundamental principles interacts with the others, the higher the risk of burnout and thus significantly lower patient safety. The Conservation of Resources Theory is similar to Maslach's scale in that it essentially states that if one of the four pillars is lost, safety and control are also at risk. Accordingly, healthcare organizations and nursing administration should develop strategies to shield nurses from the threat of resource loss in order to reduce nurse burnout, which could enhance nurse and patient safety. According to estimates, 50% of nursing practitioners have experienced burnout, which increases the chance of adverse events that shouldn't occur, putting patients at an increased risk of anything from 26% to 70%.

Nursing burnout is a workplace hazard that has an impact on companies, society as a whole, patients, and nurses. Patient satisfaction is down, care is less safe and effective, and nurses are less committed to their organizations and are less productive. Burnout is typically thought of as a personal problem. The wider perspective required to treat nurse burnout is provided by recasting burnout as an organizational and collective phenomena.