Relationship between Moral Distress and Job Burnout in Nurses of Critical Care Units of Hospitals

that may be caused by various reasons. In the long term, job burnout is one of the serious consequences of moral distress. The current study was carried out aiming at determining the association between moral distress and job burnout of nurses working in the intensive care units of hospitals affiliated to Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in 2021.

 This was a cross-sectional descriptive correlational study. A total of 350 nurses working in all intensive care units of hospitals affiliated to Zanjan University of Medical Sciences in 2021were selected by total population sampling method. Data collection tools included Hamric’s Moral Distress Scale-Revised (MDS-R) and Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) Manual. The data was analyzed by means of descriptive inferential statistics and through SPSS 20 software.

Ethical Considerations:

 The present study was approved by the ethics committee. Ethical considerations were observed, such as completing the informed consent form, voluntary participation and explaining the research objectives, as well as ensuring the confidentiality of the information.

 The nurses in question had an overall mean of moral distress equal to (116.47±49.79), indicating a low level of moral distress. Moreover, the burnout in nurses working in intensive care units had a medium level of emotional burnout (31.76±5.41), a high level of depersonalization (13.45±4.77) and a low level of personal success (26.24±5.61). The results revealed a significant and direct association between moral distress and the depersonalization dimension of job burnout (r=0.18, P<0.001), besides its significant and inverse association with the individual success dimension of job burnout (r=-0.17, P<0.001).

 Given the association between moral distress and job burnout in intensive care units’ nurses, the officials of the medical centers are required to formulate strategies like periodic review of this phenomenon besides arranging training sessions to take steps in the field of how to deal with ethical distresses in the wards to decline their impacts on the care of patients as well as preventing burnout among nurses.