Emotional Freedom Technique: Reducing Stress, Anxiety, and Burnout in Critical Care Nurses

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BACKGROUND: Critical care nurses often experience stress, anxiety, and burnout as a result of their high-stress work environments, frequent life-or-death situations, frequent need to make critical decisions, and high-acuity patients. These negative emotional states-which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic-may affect their work, personal lives, and overall well-being. LOCAL PROBLEM: A survey of employees of a cardiovascular specialty hospital showed that 9.7% of nurses working in the intensive care unit rated their degree of stress at work as unmanageable, with 8.3% reporting moderate stress. In addition, 11.1% of the nurses reported severe burnout. Therefore, a quality improvement project was implemented to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout levels among these critical care nurses by at least 30% over a 3-month period using the Emotional Freedom Technique. METHODS: A workshop was developed for critical care nurses on how to appropriately use the Emotional Freedom Technique to reduce stress, anxiety, and burnout. Participating nurses were surveyed before and after the intervention. All of the participants demonstrated understanding using the educational technique of return demonstration. RESULTS: A total of 68 critical care nurses were invited to participate in this project, of whom 64 attended the workshop and completed the surveys. Use of the Emotional Freedom Technique resulted in overall reductions in stress, anxiety, and burnout of 35%, 18%, and 3%, respectively, with the results being statistically significant (P < .05). CONCLUSION: Use of the Emotional Freedom Technique is an effective strategy for reducing stress, anxiety, and burnout among critical care nurses.

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