Resilience and burnout in healthcare students and inpatient psychiatric nurses: A between-groups study of two populations

BACKGROUND: Stressful environments can have significant effects on an individual and lead to burnout. Psychological consequences of burnout include trauma reactions, depression, anxiety and substance use disorders. Resilience, a protective mechanism can mitigate the negative impact of burnout. METHOD: This study utilizes an exploratory correlational design to determine whether or not there is 1) a similar correlation between resilience and burnout between psychiatric nurses working in a high stress environment and students who are naive to the high stress academic environment and 2) a higher level of resilience in the psychiatric nurses compared to the healthcare students. RESULTS: A significant inverse relationship was observed with respect to resilience and burnout in both the professional nurse and student groups. However, the inpatient psychiatric nurse group was not found to have a higher level of resilience than the student group, when controlling for age. Conclusion: This suggests that resilience to burnout is not related to the work environment but life experience (age) was found to be a factor related resilience in this sample.