The impact of job rotation on nurses burnout in Ayatollah Kashani hospital, Tehran: A case study

Job burnout is one of the syndromes which is known by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and deterioration of job performance. Due to the negative impact this syndrome on patients, employees, and organization in healthcare settings this issue has drawn attention of many researchers to itself during recent years. Despite the large number of publications in this area however, limited attention has been paid to the factors influencing job burnout. The goal of the present study was to determine the level of job burnout and impacts of job rotation on nurses burnout in Ayatollah Kashani hospital, Tehran.

In order to do this research a historical cohort study was done to determine degree of job burnout among nurses with and without job rotation in Ayatollah Kashani Hospital in Tehran. The number for nurses with job rotation was (n=59) and without job rotation (n=29). Data was collected via a self-report ques tionnaire. Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was used to assess the job burnout of the subjects.

The overall findings revealed that nurses had low level of emotional exhaustion, low level of depersonalization and middle level of declining in personal accomplishment. No significant difference was observed between the job burnout of the tow group of nurses - with and without rotation. In comparing the level of job burnout among the nurses of different wards (i.e. between wards comparison) the findings revealed that nurses of the emergency ward, had higher rate of depersonalization (P=0.012).

The nurses burnout showed to be at the medium level with respect to the personal accomplishment subscale, which seems to require a managerial intervention in this hospital. Apparently job rotation as it is done currently has no significant impact on the nurses’ job burnout in Ayatollah Kashani hospital and these researchers suggest that other alternative approaches to be consider to be used to improve personal accomplishment and to decrease job burnout among the investigated nurses.