Relationship Between Productivity and Burnout in Nurses of Military Hospitals in Tehran

Due to nurses’ important role in patients’ quality of care and health promotion, it is vitally important that nurses remain productive. Undoubtedly, burnout is one of the factors that has the greatest effect on productivity. If the strong relationship between burnout and productivity is proven, then managers can be encouraged to provide better conditions for nurses to be more productive. The current study was conducted to investigate the relationship between productivity and burnout in nurses of the Aja Hospitals in Tehran. This cross-sectional study was carried out on 322 clinical nurses working in Aja Hospitals in Tehran. The subjects were recruited by multi-stage sampling methods in 2012-2013. Data was collected using the Persian version of the productivity questionnaire which was prepared by Nayeri et al. and the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which was then analyzed by SPSS software Version: 19, IBM Company. The findings showed that many nurses (35.1%) obtained a high productivity score. From the viewpoint of burnout intensity, the majority of nurses (85.4%) were at medium to high levels in the dimension of emotional exhaustion. Moreover, most (79.8%) obtained high scores in the dimension of depersonalization. In the dimension of personal accomplishment, 61.5% of nurses felt little success. Pearson’s correlation coefficient indicated a weak statistical reverse relationship between total productivity score and burnout dimensions (P < 0.001). Based on the high levels of burnout found in this study, greater awareness and knowledge of the contributing factors are essential in order to increase nurses’ productivity. Formulating policies in order to remove these contextual factors, prophylaxis, treatment and training methods, and adaptive coping strategies, are also required.