349 nurses from a variety of disciplines, mostly acute care and critical care nurses

Participants were asked open-ended questions and were allowed to opt-out of any questions they did not want to answer. Researchers then used inductive content analysis to discover any categories, patterns, or themes in participants’ responses.

Seven themes were discussed in the survey results. These themes included the feeling of having no time or “overwork,” fatigue and/or lack of sleep, outside commitments, lack of resources/facilities, an unhealthy food culture, unsupportive individuals in their personal lives, and negative role models.

These factors can all contribute to making a culture of self-care difficult to build and access. Nurses across multiple areas of care reported the same barriers to their health promotion despite having very different responsibilities at work.

We were interested in the topic of self-care for nurses because we wanted to understand what prevents nurses from spending time on self-care and how this factors into nursing burnout.

Nurses promote healthy habits to their patients, but they should be taking care of themselves as well. Finding the barriers to self-care in nursing can lead to changes at the institutional level, interpersonal level, and intrapersonal level.

Having a healthy nursing workforce is a priority.

Knowing barriers to self-care for nurses can help determine what needs to be changed in and out of the workplace to help ensure a healthy nursing workforce. This information is essential for current and future nurses like us to know so that we can understand what instigates burnout and try to eradicate these barriers should we encounter them.