Reimagining pediatric nursing sustainability: Exploring trauma-informed care and impostor syndrome as drivers of burnout.

BACKGROUND

Pediatric nurses carry heavy emotional and clinical demands that leave them vulnerable to burnout. Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) has helped ease burnout in the workplace, but psychological factors like Impostor Syndrome (IS) may weaken these benefits. Whether IS mediates the TIC-burnout link has not been well studied.

AIM: To examine the mediating effect of impostor syndrome on the association of trauma-informed care with burnout in pediatric nurses.

METHODS

A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in six hospitals of Mansoura City, Egypt, between October 2024 and January 2025, with a sample size of 251 pediatric critical care nurses (96.5% response rate). Instruments included Trauma-Informed Care Scale, Maslach Burnout Inventory, and Clance Impostor Syndrome Scale. Data were analyzed by means of Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression, and mediation analysis through PROCESS macro with 5000 bootstrap samples.

RESULTS

Impostor syndrome was the strongest predictor of burnout (β = 0.383, p < .001), followed by attitude toward TIC (β = 0.234, p = .047). Female nurses reported lower burnout, though only IS acted as a mediator. IS partially mediated the association of TIC with burnout (indirect effect = 0.15, 95% CI (0.06, 0.24)), with the model explaining 50.3% of burnout variance.

CONCLUSION

Impostor syndrome has the potential to alter the work requirements of TIC into further vulnerability to burnout. Comprehensive support for pediatric nurses should incorporate trauma-informed practices alongside programs and strategies to ameliorate the experience of self-doubt, thus improving well-being and care quality.