Nurse Burnout Linked to Reduced Patient Safety
MedPage Today November 5, 2024
— It’s time to move beyond simply teaching nurses to “tolerate a broken system,” researcher says
Nurse burnout was consistently tied to reduced patient safety and satisfaction, and lower quality of care, a meta-analysis involving decades of data indicated.
In the evaluation of 85 studies with 288,581 nurses from 32 countries, occupational burnout was associated with:
- Lower safety climate or culture: standardized mean difference (SMD) of -0.68 (95% CI -0.83 to -0.54)
- Lower patient satisfaction ratings: SMD -0.51 (95% CI -0.86 to -0.17)
- Lower nurse-assessed quality of care: SMD -0.44 (95% CI -0.57 to -0.30)
The findings persisted regardless of nurses’ age, sex, work experience, and geography, according to Tait Shanafelt, MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine...