Abstract
Both globally, and in the UK, there is a shortage of around 6 million nurses (Ball et al., 2021; World Health Organization, 2021). Many nurses have been leaving the nursing profession due to growing demands, paired with reduced autonomy (Maben and Conolly, 2023). In the UK and the US, research shows nurses are at a disproportionately high risk of work-related stress, burnout, depression and anxiety, and suicide, with 300 nurses in England and Wales taking their own lives between 2011 and 2017 (Davis et al., 2021; Kinman et al., 2020). This situation was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic with many nurses reporting symptoms of poor psychological health (Couper et al., 2022). Research has highlighted how nurses were afraid of the contagion risks of COVID-19, both for themselves and their families (Maben et al., 2022; Maben and Conolly, 2023).
In this paper, the authors unpick the variables associated with the fear of contagion of COVID-19 with burnout. A serious fear of contagion was associated with burnout in the nurses in the research. Their findings indicated that burnout was associated with: young age, having children, being married, being single (compared to being divorced and widowed), and feeling discriminated against generating a greater impact on people’s quality of life by increasing emotional fatigue and depersonalization.