The Relationship between Shift Work and Occupational Burnout among Nurses in a Teaching Hospital in Ahvaz

Occupational burnout is determined by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal performance. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between shift work and burnout in different parts of a teaching hospital in Ahvaz city in 2016.
This descriptive-analytic study was conducted on 180 shift nurses. Stratified sampling was used to collect samples and Maslach and Jackson's burnout questionnaires were applied to collect data. Data were then analyzed using SPSS18 software.
Analysis of the results of this study showed that "emotional exhaustion" and "depersonalization" with respective frequencies of 77.2 % and 92.8 % are severe in nurses. On the other hand, the "reduced personal performance" has been reported at a rate of 90.6 %.
High levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization on the one hand and low level of reduced personal performance among the studied nurses is an alert for managers in the field of health. In the case of not considering appropriate management measures to improve the burnout dimensions, psychological and physical damages can be caused by shift work on employees of the health sector.