Impact of nursing students’ profile on burnout syndrome and hardiness personality

Abstract

Objective: The stressful college environment may cause Burnout Syndrome in nursing students, but few of them present stress resistance and do not show Burnout signs. Investigations that simultaneously assess these groups are limited. So, we assessed the impact of nursing students’ profile (biosocial and academic features) on the occurrence of Burnout Syndrome and Hardiness Personality.

Methods: Cross-sectional, analytic and quantitative study. We applied a biosocial and academic form, the Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Hardiness Scale in 570 Brazilian nursing students. Logistic and linear regression analysis were used to assess the impact of biosocial and academic features on Burnout and Hardiness. The Ethics Research Committee at the University approved this project under protocol No. 0380.0.243.000-10.

Results: Interest of keeping enrolled in course, sedentary lifestyle, semester and number of disciplines taken by students significantly contributed to increase the Burnout scores. Age, absence of children, living with family, dissatisfaction with nursing course and the unemployment significantly increased Hardiness scores. The variable “academic load” contributed to both phenomena.

Conclusions: While biosocial features strength the hardy components in nursing students, protecting them from negative stress outcomes, nursing training characteristics seem negatively impact on student’s health. Thus, identifying the factors that contribute to stress resistance and those that may increase the risk of Burnout, will support interventions that to promote Hardy personality and prevent Burnout in academic environment.