Nurses Are Burned Out. Can Hospitals Change in Time to Keep Them?

February 20, 2023

(New York Times) – Burnout has always been a part of nursing, an effect of long working hours in physically and often emotionally taxing environments. The Covid pandemic exacerbated those factors and added some of its own: understaffing, a rise in violence and hostility toward health care workers over masking mandates and an increase in deaths, particularly in the early months of the pandemic. In a study from the American Nurses Foundation, released last month, 57 percent of 12,581 surveyed nurses said they had felt “exhausted” over the past two weeks, and 43 percent said they felt “burned out.” Just 20 percent said they felt valued. (Those numbers were largely consistent throughout the pandemic.) (Read More)