Thesis

Other factors related to burnout have been decreased personnel and Walcott & Ervin (1992)
have for example shown that not having enough personnel in hospitals was increasing the
levels of workload and was a source of stress for nurses. These researchers have also shown
that having to work with a decreased amount of colleague nurses was one of the most stressful
experiences in their nursing sample, and thus that the amount of nurses working in a hospital
and burnout has an inverse relationship. According to Beaver, Sharp & Cotsonis (1986)
another variable related to burnout has been the number of children a nurse has. These
researchers found that the more children a nurse had, the higher her level of emotional
exhaustion and personal accomplishment would be. They also mentioned that the relationship
between number of children and personal accomplishment was an inverse one.
Burke (2003) conducted a research looking at the workload of nurses related to the patient-
nurse ratio and if restructuring of the hospital had an impact on this ratio. The research also
looked into whether the patient-nurse ratio had an impact on work satisfaction, psychological
well-being, and nurses’ ideas of the hospital’s functioning and effectiveness. This study
demonstrated that while the hospital underwent restructuring, alterations of the patient-nurse
ratio were frequent and in the majority of cases the alterations were an increase in patient-
nurse ratio. Looking at nurses job satisfaction, workload, and well-being it was shown that for
the nurses with increased patient-nurse ratios they reported less satisfaction with work,
increased workloads, decreased psychological well-being, and poorer organizational work. It
was interesting to note that some nurses who had decreased patient-nurse ratios still accounted
for decreased positive results. The researcher argued that possibly it does not matter which
change takes place at the hospital, the nurses were experiencing them as negative ones. It
looked like the decrease in patient- nurse ratios were regularly connected with an increase in
supervision duties. Consequently, a decrease in patient-nurse ratios was seen as something
positive by the majority of nurses; however the accumulation of supervisory duties while the
hospital was being restructured was seen as something negative by a number of nurses, since
the supervision produced extra stress for the nurses experiencing this supervisory duty.
Kalliath & Morris (2002) conducted a research in nurses related to burnout and different
levels of job satisfaction, looking more precisely at which effect the different levels of job
satisfaction had on burnout. The researchers theorized that increased levels of job satisfaction
would give lower burnout scores. They stated that it has been shown that burnout in nurses
arise from stress caused by hospital restructuring. These restructuring which result in social