Coping Strategies, Burnout, and Intent to Leave Among Critical Care Nurses

Abstract

There has been a great deal of research interest devoted to the stressful situations encountered in critical care nursing, but few attempts to explore the relationships between individual responses to stressful situations and outcome variables. Guided by the framework of stress and coping proposed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984), this study examined the relationship between the coping behaviours critical care nurses used to manage a hypothetical stressful situation and outcomes, including burnout and intent to leave.

Self-report data were collected from 173 critical care nurses from three agencies in Atlantic Canada. Instruments used to measure the study variables included: the Ways of Coping Questionnaire (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1986), and a single item measure of intent to leave. A variety of descriptive and inferential statistics were used to explore the relationships between the study variables.

The most frequently used coping strategies were planful problem-solving, self-controlling, and seeking social support. Only one of the eight methods of coping measured, planful problem-solving, was significantly related to tenure in critical care nursing. The findings demonstrated a significant relationship between the nurses choice of coping strategies and burnout. Escape/avoidance and confrontive coping were predictive of burnout. Planful problem-solving and positive reappraisal were negatively related to burnout. Burnout was also predictive of the nurses' intent to leave their current positions. The findings suggest that both personal and situational factors, as well as individual responses to stressful situations have an impact on the turnover of nursing staff in critical care units.