Association of Occupational Burnout and Nursing Errors With Patient Safety: A Systemic Review

Introduction

The mental health statue of healthcare professionals is an important issue (Mark & Smith, 2012) and must be of great concern to health care organizations and researchers (Kirwan, Matthews & Scott, 2013). Nurses are called upon to deal with situations of severe psychological stress that could lead to occupational distress syndrome over an extended period (Baier, 2018). Such situations are the lack of human resources in hospitals, the quality of interpersonal relationships among team members (Aiken et al., 2002), the attitude of administration to the healthcare centers (Sims, 1997; Robinson et al., 1991). Occupational stress and burnout can have adverse effects on both professional behavior (Bakker et al., 2000) and patient health and safety (Dewa et al., 2017).

When providing nursing care, errors or adverse events are likely to occur. The Institute of Medicine defines error as the failure to complete a planned task or use of a wrong method to accomplish the goal. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that one out of ten patients has been affected by a human error. Also, the Institute of Medicine adds that between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths are recorded each year due to medical errors (Mohammadfam & Saeidi, 2014; Kopec et al., 2003). Professional qualifications, nursing workload, the patient severe situation can turn into risk factors for patient missed care. Nurses coordinate and accomplish interventions to be directly near the patient (Garcia & Fugulin, 2012) and, thus, health organizations reorient their interest to patient safety culture, something that ''must'' be apparent during health care and not ''nice to have'' (Koppenberg J., 2012).