Association between job burnout and noise pollution among nurses in Behbahan city, Iran

Nowadays job burnout is a common problem in all healthcare systems, and it seems that physical factors such as noise pollution play an important role in it. Based on this, we aimed to study the association between noise pollution and job burnout among nurses in Behbahan city in 2015.
The stattistical community of this cross-sectional analytic study included the nurses in Behbahan city in 2015 so 151 nurses were selected from 3 hospitals through systematic random sampling. The data collection tools were Maslach Burnout Inventory and standard questionnaire of noise pollution. Collected data were analyzed by SPSS 16 software through descriptive statistics, ANOVA, independent t-test, and Spearman correlation coefficient test.
25.8% of the participating nurses were male and 74.2% were female. The mean age of participants was 33.48± 8.74 years old. The mean score of noise sensitivity was 63.7±22.98 and the mean score of noise pollution was 56.52± 22.68. Most of the nurses were at the low occupational burnout level in subscales of depersonalization (63.6%) and emotional exhaustion (64.2%); but in the subscale of lack of personal success, a higher percentage of nurses (65.6%) were at the high level of burnout. There was a positive and significant direct association between the subscale of emotional exhaustion and noise pollution (P=0.000) and sensitivity to the noise (P=0.002) and also between depersonalization and noise pollution (P=0.004).
The results indicate that with the increase in noise pollution, job burnout tends to increase, specifically in the emotional exhaustion and depersonalization subscales. Therefore, it seems necessary to implement approaches to reduce noise pollution in hospitals to prevent job burnout in nurses.