Resilience and burnout status among nurses working in oncology

Kutluturkan et al. Ann Gen Psychiatry Resilience and burnout status among nurses working in oncology Sevinc Kutluturkan 0 Elif Sozeri 0 Nese Uysal Figen Bay 0 Department of Nursing, Gazi University Faculty of Health Sciences , Besevler, 06500 Ankara , Turkey Background: This study aimed to identify the resilience and burnout status of nurses working in the field of oncology. Methods: This descriptive study was conducted with 140 oncology nurses. The data were collected using a sociodemographic attributes form, Resilience Scale for Adults, and the Maslach's Burnout Inventory. Percentage ratios, mean and median values, Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test, correlation analysis, and multiple stepwise linear regression analysis were used to evaluate the data. Results: The Maslach's Burnout Inventory total median score was 49.00. The emotional exhaustion median score was 24.00, the depersonalization median score was 9.00, and the personal accomplishment median score was 16.00. The Resilience Scale for Adults total median score was 134.00. The median resilience subscale scores, such as structural style, perception of future, family cohesion, self-perception, social competence, and social resources, were 16.00, 16.00, 24.00, 25, 23, and 31, respectively. A relationship existed between emotional exhaustion and perception of future; depersonalization and structured style and self-perception; and personal accomplishment and structured style, perception of future, and self-perception. Multiple stepwise linear regression analysis revealed a significant relationship between the number of years in the field and emotional exhaustion and depersonalization scores. Moreover, a significant relationship between structured style variables and personal accomplishment scores was observed. Conclusions: This study demonstrated the relationship between burnout and resilience situations among the oncology nurses. The results can be used to plan individual and organizational interventions to increase resilience and reduce the experience of burnout by developing measures such as improving communication skills, providing education on stress management and coping strategies, using social resources, and organizing programs that provide psychological support. Burnout; Oncology nursing; Resilience - Background Burnout is an important problem frequently encountered in the scientific, social, and professional lives. One of the main factors that lead to burnout is exposure to stress for a long time. If the stress continues for a long time, the individual is negatively affected and experiences burnout. Some factors that lead to burnout in oncology include physical stressors (e.g., working under unsuitable conditions, long working hours, and insufficient tools and equipment as well as insufficient staff ), psychological stressors (e.g., too many symptoms related to diseases and treatment, increased expectations of patients and families, and problems related to occupational safety), and administrational stressors (e.g., insufficient performance measures and unsatisfactory salaries) [1–3]. This burnout manifests in the form of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a decrease in personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion represents the individual stress dimension of burnout. Depersonalization is the dimension where cold, uninterested, and strict and nonhuman attitudes develop toward the person’s job or toward other people from work-related relations. © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. A diminished sense of personal accomplishment is the reduction in a person’s sense of competence and feelings of success [4]. In the study conducted by Trufelliet et al. [5] emotional exhaustion was 36%, depersonalization was 34%, and low personal accomplishment was 25% in oncology professionals. Burnout has negative effects on physical, emotional, and mental health. One of the most important factors to prevent burnout is the effective management of the sources of stress which lead to burnout. Individuals’ personality traits and psychological functions are the most important factors in stress management and preventing burnout [6]. In recent years, the concept of psychological resilience has emerged as a personality trait that is protective against burnout [7–9]. Despite a number of descriptions focusing on different aspects of resilience, which has a multidimensional and learnable structure, res (...truncated)