Exploring the effects of break nurses on nursing staff burnout

Abstract

Objective: Previous studies had found that rest breaks can not only prevent or improve negative reactions to stress in healthcare staff, but also reduce turnover in understaff conditions, improve work performance, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. As a result, many inpatient units had implemented a nursing position called a Break Nurse, whose sole purpose was to provide rest breaks. However, the implementation of a Break Nurse and its effectiveness was not reported in literature. Therefore, this quality improvement QI project proposed to implement Break Nurses on an acute care unit of impatient setting and investigate its effectiveness on nursing staff.
Methods: The selected unit previously utilizing a Break-Buddy model for securing rest breaks was able to start a two 8-hour shift Break Nurse model. The hypothesis is that the Two-Break-Nurse model, when compared with the Break-Buddy model, will better secure rest breaks, reduce burnout symptoms experienced by nursing staff. The validated tool used to measure burnout is the Maslach Burnout Inventory. The study utilized pre- and post-implementation self-report survey statistical analysis to report outcomes.
Results: In the end, 14 individuals had responded to both pre- and post-implementation surveys. The results show that there was statistically significant improvement of Emotional Exhaustion. Due to the small sample size, the measurement of Depersonalization and Personal Accomplishment did not show statistically significant improvement.
Conclusions: The Two-Break-Nurse model is effective at reducing emotional exhaustion for nursing staff. Further studies are needed to measure in a larger scale the effectiveness of break nurse model on other aspects of burnout and the improvement of clinical outcomes.

Keywords

Burnout / Break nurse / Emotional exhaustion / Nursing staff

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is an honor to recognize the following list of individuals who has helped the author accomplish this QI project: Seattle Pacific University College of Nursing Dean, Librarian, IRB representative; Unit managers, hospital research staff and nursing quality inquiry council members.

FUNDING

Nil.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE

The author declares that there is no conflicts of interest.

INFORMED CONSENT

Obtained.

ETHICS APPROVAL

The Publication Ethics Committee of the Sciedu Press. The journal’s policies adhere to the Core Practices established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

PROVENANCE AND PEER REVIEW

Not commissioned; externally double-blind peer reviewed.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

DATA SHARING STATEMENT

No additional data are available.

OPEN ACCESS

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

COPYRIGHTS

Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

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