Association between nursing work environment, burnout, and turnover intention: A cross-sectional study in Greece

A nurse's work environment has consistently been the most important factor affecting the emergence of burnout and their choice to resign from their positions.

This work seeks to investigate the impact of the nursing work environment on job burnout and turnover intentions among nurses.

A cross-sectional study was conducted during October 2024 in Greece. We employed the "Practice Environment Scale-5" to assess the nursing work environment. Additionally, we used the single item burnout measure to measure job burnout, and the single item turnover intention measure to measure turnover intention among our nurses. We used multivariable regression models to adjust for demographic and job variables.

More than half of the nurses (56.7%) reported a high level of turnover intention. The mean score on the single item burnout measure (7.78) indicated high levels of burnout in our sample. The multivariable linear regression analysis showed that lower levels of staffing and resource adequacy were associated with the increased job burnout (adjusted beta = -0.431, 95% CI = -0.683 to -0.180, p-value = 0.001). Similarly, our multivariable logistic regression model found an independent negative effect of staffing and resource adequacy on the turnover intention (adjusted OR = 0.594, 95% confidence interval = 0.421 to 0.840, p-value = 0.003).

Our multivariable analysis indicated that a diminishing nursing work environment is associated with an increased job burnout and turnover intention. Improving the nursing work environment is essential to reduce the job burnout and turnover intention among nurses.