Return to work with fatigue after stroke: A complex occupational adaptation process.

Burnout is characterized by emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization, and decreased personal accomplishment resulting from prolonged work stress. It is recognized as an occupational syndrome and is a significant concern for healthcare professionals, including registered nurses. Burnout among nurses negatively affects the care they provide and can adversely affect their quality of life and health. For instance, increased burnout in nurses is associated with increased medical error, poorer quality of care, and decreased patient safety. Emotional exhaustion is often the first and most prominent manifestation of burnout and has been associated with nurses’ characteristics (age, work experience, education), resilience and coping factors, and work-related factors such as patient acuity, workload, and level of organizational support. Emotional exhaustion also occurs in the context of workplace stressors such as death situations, emergencies, and other high-stress duties. Neonatal nurses play a vital role in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) team, as they provide direct care to premature and term-but-ill infants who require high-intensity critical care over a prolonged hospitalization. Neonatal nurses are responsible for managing the complex care of the infants and for preparing parents to care for them upon discharge, based on a family and home needs assessment. Care provided by NICU nurses during hospitalization has a high potential to impact both short- and longer-term outcomes of infants and their families. Consequently, nursing care in the NICU, with its high patient acuity and critical stakes, can contribute to elevated stress levels and work-related burnout among nurses and jeopardize patient safety. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated nurse burnout due to the fear associated with the pandemic, high-risk clinical environment, increased workload, and inadequate and insufficient material and human resources. More than one in two acute care nurses reported burnout related to COVID-19 in 2022, and even more concerning is that one in three nurses who leave the profession cite burnout as the reason. In NICUs, visitor restrictions hindered important aspects of parental support, such as parent participation in infant’s care and lactation support for mothers. Nurses’ interactions with parents and infants, and interactions between parents and infants, may have decreased due to fear of transmitting the virus. These pandemic-influenced changes had potential to exacerbate nurses’ work-related stress and contribute to nurse burnout. Burnout among nurses has already been documented as being related to factors such as turnover, job satisfaction, and coping strategies prior to the pandemic. However, few studies have examined burnout and perceived stress among NICU nurses during a period of heightened workforce strain.