Coping with Occupational Stress and Burnout in Healthcare

Unhealthy lifestyle is giving way to a multifold increase in the need for healthcare industry in India and worldwide. Healthcare has one of the most stressful working environments for the employees. In order to maintain the professional demeanor and care for the terminally ill patients the healthcare professionals are demanded to be available all the time. Emotionally demanding patients adds to the severity of situation. The healthcare professionals are physically, emotionally and psychologically so drained that it results in occupational stress and hence burnout and adopt different ways of coping to work effectively and efficiently. The present study was conducted on a sample of 600 healthcare professionals from the private hospitals of Delhi, NCR. The sample included nursing, support staff (security, pharmacy, front office, housekeeping and dietetics/food and beverages staff) and doctors with equal number of male and female participants. Ways of Coping Scale-Revised (Folkman and Lazarus, 1985) was the assessment tool used in the present study. It was observed that nursing was most severely affected by occupational stress and burnout as compared to doctors and other support staff and the healthcare professionals use different ways of coping to combat stress.