Burnout and Coping Strategies among Nurses: A Literature Review

The concept of stress plays an important role in an occupational area, especially health care setting. Health care professionals are repeatedly exposed to this stress, especially nursing personnel. The response to this chronic stress is termed burnout. In other words, burnout means giving more time, energy, and effort to work for a long period of time leading to exhaustion both mentally and physically. In order to reduce these burnout symptoms, an individual tries to adopt certain strategies to minimize his/her negative feelings. This is known as a coping strategy. Due to the increase in workload, advancement in science and technology, quality patient care, these symptoms have escalated which have drawn attention to health care organizations. Many strategies have been developed to reduced these symptoms and develop a positive environment for nurses to work within it. Keywords: Burnout, coping strategies, nurses.