Nursing attitudes to the psychiatric treatment of people with intellectual disabilities: relationship to expressed emotion, burnout, and coping within a medium secure unit

Aim: To explore how treatment attitudes of nursing and care staff relate to job satisfaction, burnout and coping skills and subsequently, how these impact the relationship that nursing and care staff have with their patients.

Method: Within the current study, the treatment attitudes, levels of occupational burnout and coping skills were measured among 40 nursing and care staff working

within a medium secure hospital for people with ID. Nursing and care staff also completed the five-minute-speech-sample regarding 50 patients which was used to provide a measure of expressed emotion (EE). Additional patient data, which includes intellectual functioning, language ability, and severity of challenging behaviour, was also collected.

Results: Staff reporting high EE also had a tendency to score higher on the Attitudes toward Treatment Questionnaire, suggesting the endorsement of more ‘organic’ treatment attitudes. Those with high EE also scored higher on Depersonalisation, while scoring lower on Emotional Exhaustion, suggesting that there may be some sort of a relationship between EE and burnout.

Conclusions: This will be further explored as these results are preliminary and based on a small sample size.