Addressing Burnout in Psychiatric Nursing: Evidence-Based Strategies Aligned with SDG 3 and SDG 10

Abstract

Burnout has become an occupational hazard in many sectors especially in the area of healthcare, where psyche nurses are confronted with challenging working environments full of challenging patient related roles and responsibilities. This paper highlights the prevalence, the factors that can contribute to burnout in psychiatric nursing, the impact, and what can be done to decrease burnout in psychiatric nursing based on review of available literature. The results have shown that burnout is quite high, at 40-70 percent among psychiatric nurses around the world, pointing out factors that include organizational issues like shortages in staffing, long hours at work and lack of support of leadership to them as well as patient-related stressors like patient aggression, suicidality and trauma. The effects are two-fold, hurting the wellbeing of nurses, affecting patient safety, care quality, and organizational efficiency. The approaches to reduce burnout are classified into: organizational interventions (e.g., management of working hours, strong leadership, safe working culture), individual interventions (e.g., mindfulness, resilience training, counselling, self-care) and integrated measures which are a merger of both systemic and personal methods. The discussion highlights that the reduction of burnout in psychiatric nurses is crucially important to increase job satisfaction in the organization, patient outcomes, and the sustainability of mental health services.