Abstract
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there already was an increase in burnout among healthcare workers in many countries (Chew, 2020) and it may have worsened this issue within already strained healthcare systems, intensifying the harmful effects of burnout. While other psychological effects of the pandemic have been extensively studied, burnout has received less attention.
In South Africa, was first reported by National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD). The report highlighted that the World Health Organization (WHO) had first confirmed the first case of COVID-19 on the 31st of December (NICD, 2020). This was after a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. On 5 August 2020 the Worldometer reported that the number had increased to 19 282 782 cases and 718 076 deaths. In South Africa, the same report stated that there were 538 184 cases and 9604 cases as on that date (Worldometer, 2020). These figures raised concerns regarding the institutional capacity of the South African healthcare system to control the disease without detrimental effects on healthcare workers such as nurses.
As South Africa awaited the development of a vaccine, the pressure on nurses who worked in the front line continued to intensify. The overwhelming burden of the disease stressed the already fragile healthcare system and this stress was transferred directly to nurses, who faced adverse effects such as the risk of infection and longer working hours. Updating the parliament on 30 June 2020, Dr Zweli Mkhize, the Minister of Health, reported that 2,473 nurses in the country were infected with COVID-19. Shortages of PPE were outlined as one of the major reasons for the infections.
In this study a cross-sectional survey design was conducted for 3 months between September and December 2020. To assess burnout frequencies, the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) was used and this survey incorporated demographic questions, inquiries about participants' status over the past two months. A total of 380 nurses from both private and public hospitals in Gauteng were invited to participate.
Burnout is generally referred to as an extreme dip of emotional energy along with a high rate of depersonalization on the I-BOS scale. To measure burnout participants were invited to complete a which as deployed through Google Forms. Each variable of interest was computed and reported in descriptive statistics. For measures on numeric variables, the median, range,
and interquartile range was used while on categorical ones, frequency and proportions were used. In order to assess the differences in the proportions of nurses who reported burnout while working in a private compared to a public hospital, a chi-square test was conducted