Impact of the work environment on the mental health of nurses in intensive care units
Keywords:
work environment, mental health, critical care nursing, burnout, moral distress, intensive care units.Abstract
This integrative review examines scientific literature published from 2019 to 2023 on the relationship between the work environment and mental health among intensive care unit nurses. A bibliographic update and metadata audit were conducted, including cross-verification of DOIs and editorial data through PubMed, publisher websites, and open academic sources. The final corpus comprised 31 publications from the five-year period and was synthesized thematically and narratively. Findings indicate that burnout, depression, anxiety, moral distress, and compassion fatigue are associated with workload, staffing, practice-environment quality, exposure to ethically challenging situations, and work organization. Intervention evidence is promising, particularly for mindfulness, resilience, ethics education, and debriefing, but remains limited by small samples and heterogeneity. Protecting mental health therefore requires combining organizational change with individual and team resources rather than placing responsibility solely on nurses to adapt to structurally adverse conditions.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Emily Ashley Alvarado Bastidas (Autor/a)
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