Burnout :: Nurses must be assertive or risk burnout

Recent studies report that 4% of novice nurses in Japan quit within nine months on the job, while 8.5% quit within one year.

Researchers from the Japan Academy of Nursing Science set out to explore the factors contributing to this turnover rate, as the issue of early turnover and burnout of novice nurses – although traditionally a socially ?taboo? matter ? has recently gained momentum as an important subject in the health-care industry as a whole.

Published by Blackwell Publishing in the latest issue of Japan Journal of Nursing Science, this paper aims to clarify the relationship between the level of assertiveness of the novice nurses and the incidence of burnout in their first year at university hospitals, as well as to catalogue to the factors vital in assertion training in order to arm the novices against the seemingly inevitable burnout.

Led by key author Dr. Eiko Suzuki from the School of Nursing at the Yamagata University?s Faculty of Medicine, the researchers hypothesized that the best method for preventing burnout was to employ an internal approach and focus the training on the concept of assertiveness. Findings published in the paper include:

20.5% of the novice nurses experienced burnout and 7.2 % from serious burnout during their first year at university hospital in Japan.

Novice nurses tend to burnout easily when their assertiveness scores are either too low or too high in Japan.


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