The Impact of Nurse Work Environment on Job Burnout and Turnover Intention

The work environment of nurses has consistently been the most important factor affecting the emergence of burnout and their choice to resign from their positions. Objective: To examine the effect of nurse work environment on job burnout and turnover intention among nurses. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted during October 2024 in Greece. We used the “Practice Environment Scale-5” to measure nurse work environment. Also, 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 created multivariable regression models after adjustment for several demographic and job variables. Results: More than half of nurses (56.7%) reported a high level of turnover intention. Mean score on single item burnout measure (7.78) indicated high levels of burnout in our sample. Multivariable linear regression analysis showed that lower levels of staffing and resource adequacy was associated with 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 turnover intention (adjusted OR = 0.594, 95% confidence interval = 0.421 to 0.840, p-value = 0.003). Conclusion: Our multivariable analysis showed that worse nurse work environment was associated with higher levels of job burnout and turnover intention. Improvement of nurse work environment is essential to reduce job burnout and turnover intention among nurses.