Professional burnout among studying nurses

Burnout is a response to stress, the source of which is the situation at work. This phenomenon concerns mainly representatives of professions whose essence is to work with people, including doctors, nurses, paramedics and others; their close committed interactions with others constitute the core of professional activity and determine the success and development. Participants of the study were 281 students of extramural complementary nursing course at the University of Warmia and Mazury, mostly aged 40-60 years, employed in hospital wards and with employment contracts. In the study, the authors' demographic questionnaire of structuralized interview and the MBI questionnaire, developed by Maslach and Jackson, in the Polish version by Pasikowski (2004), were used. The obtained results were statistically analysed. The performed analysis of burnout has confirmed that emotional exhaustion is associated with the length of employment, the number of days off and the number of institutions where nurses were employed. We did not observe, however, any correlation with these variables between depersonalisation and a sense of the lack of achievements. Furthermore, no dependence of the severity of the professional burnout symptoms on the surveyed groups' age was found. It turned out that the persons working in shifts system felt much stronger depletion of emotion than nurses working in a daily system. It was also observed that nurses employed in hospitals felt much stronger symptoms in both areas of occupational burnout than those working in other institutions. Furthermore, it was not confirmed that the absence of the sense of achievement depended on where the respondents were employed. Taking into account the reference levels of the three dimensions of burnout acc. to MBI it was found out that most respondents were characterized by a low value within the emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation and a high value in terms of a sense of the lack of achievement.