MENTAL AND PSYCHOSOMATIC CONSEQUENCES OF JOB BURNOUT IN CRITICAL CARE NURSING PROFESSION: A CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY

Abstract

Critical care nursing is considered as one of the most stressful professions in the modern healthcare systems, making it suitable for the development of job burnout. Considering this, we conducted a cross-sectional study to determine the frequency and level of chronic anxiety, as well as the frequency of psychosomatic manifestations of job burnout in the population of nurses employed in intensive care units at the University Hospital in Belgrade. The study included 71 respondents. We implemented several specific questionnaires in the test battery to determine the prevalence of chronic anxiety and the most common psychosomatic manifestation of burnout in the population of affected respondents (experimental group), and we compared the results to those found in a population of subjects who had no evidence of burnout symptoms at the time of the study (control group). Anxiety symptoms were nearly three times more prevalent in the experimental group, with high levels of anxiety registered in 88% of respondents. At the same time, psychosomatic manifestations were five times more common in the experimental group, affecting 97% subjects in total. The most common complaints were: headache (92% of respondents), sleep disorders (87.5% of respondents), gastrointestinal disorders (79% of respondents), and emotional/behavioural abreactions (67% of respondents). The results of our study indicate the necessity of developing national burnout prevention programs in critical care nursing and similar healthcare professions with high levels of stress exposure.