Deflecting the Path to Burn-out among Community Health Nurses: How the Effective Practice of Self-Tuning Renews Job Engagement

Abstract

Interviews with eleven community nurses with reputations for high job engagement revealed that nine had earlier been near burn-out but had managed to recapture job engagement. For these nine nurses, the path to burn-out was set by perfectionism and devotion to nursing as a calling, coupled with inability to meet arduous self-standards. The nurses’ desire to regain job engagement triggered deep introspection and reflection, which in turn enabled coping, including solving emotional problems, striving to be a realistic idealist, making changes in the work situation and preserving time for contemplation. These processes underpin the Self Tuning Model, presented for the first time in this paper. This study suggests that the self-tuning exhibited by these nurses is salutogenic, supporting mental health and recapture of job engagement. Teaching self-tuning skills to people in stressful professions may provide skills that are critical to recapturing job engagement that may fade over time because of unremitting professional strain.

Keywords:

• self-care
• job engagement
• burn-out
• salutogenesis
• nurses
• qualitative content analysis