AI-Powered Tool

Nurse Burnout Assessment
& Recovery Planner

Last reviewed: May 6, 2026 by Jayson Minagawa, BSN, RN

A deep 5-dimension burnout evaluation — emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, efficacy, compassion fatigue, and moral injury. Get a personalized 30-day recovery plan in 15 minutes.

Just want a quick risk check? Take the 5-minute burnout quiz instead.

Start Assessment ↓ Free • No signup required • Powered by Claude AI

46% of nurses report burnout (ANA 2023)

$56K cost to hospital per burned-out nurse (NSI 2023)

$15 Maslach Burnout Inventory per use

$0 this assessment — always free

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Nurse Burnout Assessment

10 research-based questions. Personalized recovery guidance.

Question 1 of 10

This self-assessment is for self-awareness only — not a clinical diagnosis. Based on the Maslach Burnout Inventory framework adapted for healthcare workers.

Important Note

This is an AI-powered assessment tool, not a clinical diagnosis. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or the Nurse Support Line. This tool is for self-awareness and planning — not a substitute for mental health care.

This Is Not the Burnout Quiz

The nurse burnout quiz on this site is a quick 2-minute screen. This is something different. This AI-powered assessment conducts a structured 10-15 minute evaluation across five clinical dimensions of burnout, then writes you a personalized 30-day recovery plan based on your actual situation — your unit, your shift, your home life, your specific stressors.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory — the gold-standard clinical tool used in research — costs $15 per assessment. This tool uses the same conceptual framework at no cost, with two additional dimensions (compassion fatigue and moral injury) that the MBI doesn't capture but that are critical for nurses.

The 5 Dimensions Assessed

Dimension 1

Emotional Exhaustion

Feeling emotionally drained and depleted by patient care. The classic "I have nothing left to give" symptom — the core of burnout as described by Maslach.

Dimension 2

Depersonalization

Emotional distancing from patients — treating them as objects, cases, or room numbers rather than people. A protective but damaging coping response to chronic overload.

Dimension 3

Personal Efficacy

Loss of sense of competence and meaningful accomplishment. When nothing you do feels like it matters — even when you're doing everything right.

Dimension 4

Compassion Fatigue

Secondary traumatic stress from absorbing patient suffering over time. Different from burnout — it's the cost of caring, not just overwork. Common in ICU, oncology, and hospice nurses.

Dimension 5

Moral Injury

Distress from being unable to provide care that aligns with your ethical values — usually due to staffing, policies, or systemic constraints. Nurses are forced to witness or participate in something that violates their moral code. This became epidemic during COVID and remains underdiagnosed.

How to Use It — 3 Steps

Answer the Assessment

The AI walks you through structured questions about your work environment, emotional state, coping patterns, and physical symptoms. Takes 10-15 minutes. Be honest — it's just between you and the AI.

Get Your Dimension Profile

The AI scores each of the five dimensions and identifies your highest-risk areas. It names what's actually happening — not just "you're burned out" but which type and why.

Receive Your Recovery Plan

Get a week-by-week 30-day plan built for your specific situation. The AI accounts for your schedule, unit type, and home stressors — not generic wellness tips.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Nurse Burnout Assessment tool?

The Nurse Burnout Assessment is an AI-powered deep assessment that evaluates nurse burnout across five clinical dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal efficacy, compassion fatigue, and moral injury. Unlike a simple quiz, it conducts a structured interview, scores each dimension separately, identifies your highest-risk areas, and generates a personalized 30-day recovery plan with specific, actionable strategies matched to your work situation and unit type.

How is this different from the burnout quiz?

The burnout quiz gives you a quick 10-question screen that takes 2 minutes and outputs a burnout risk score. The Burnout Assessment is a full clinical-depth evaluation: it asks about your specific unit, shift pattern, management environment, home life stressors, coping mechanisms, and physical symptoms. The assessment takes 10-15 minutes and outputs a dimensional score profile plus a written 30-day recovery plan with week-by-week milestones. Think of the quiz as a triage tool and the assessment as the full consult.

What is the 30-day recovery plan?

At the end of the assessment, the AI generates a personalized 30-day recovery plan based on your specific burnout profile. Week 1 focuses on stabilization — sleep hygiene, boundary-setting at work, one daily decompression practice. Week 2 introduces social reconnection strategies and identifies unit-specific stressors to address or escalate. Weeks 3 and 4 shift toward longer-term resilience: career alignment check, advocacy actions, and sustainable self-care routines. The plan is written for real nursing schedules — it accounts for night shifts, 12-hour days, and the specific challenges of ICU, ER, med-surg, and LTC environments.

What are the 5 dimensions of nurse burnout?

The five dimensions assessed are: (1) Emotional Exhaustion — feeling drained and depleted after patient care; (2) Depersonalization — emotional distancing from patients; (3) Personal Efficacy — loss of competence and meaningful accomplishment; (4) Compassion Fatigue — secondary traumatic stress from absorbing patient suffering over time; and (5) Moral Injury — distress from being unable to provide care aligned with your ethics, typically due to staffing or systemic constraints.

Is this based on the Maslach Burnout Inventory?

The assessment draws on the conceptual framework of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the gold-standard clinical tool for burnout measurement. The MBI costs $15 per assessment and must be administered by a credentialed professional. This tool uses the same three core MBI dimensions (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, personal efficacy) and adds compassion fatigue and moral injury — dimensions especially relevant for nursing. This is not a validated clinical instrument and should not replace mental health care, but it provides a structured, evidence-informed self-assessment at zero cost.

Related Tools & Guides

About the Author

Jayson Minagawa, BSN, RN

12+ years ICU/critical care • Travel Nursing • Unit Manager • MDS Coordinator • Updated March 2026

Jayson has worked through burnout firsthand — in ICU, during travel assignments, and in management. He built these tools because the resources nurses actually need are either paywalled or oversimplified. This assessment reflects what he wishes he'd had access to earlier in his career.

METHODOLOGY · CBI · CITATIONS

Methodology and citations

This assessment is built around the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) — a validated, public-domain burnout instrument developed by Kristensen et al. at the National Institute of Occupational Health (Denmark) in 2005. The CBI is one of the most widely cited burnout instruments after the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), and unlike the MBI, it is not paywalled.

Why CBI instead of MBI?

The Maslach Burnout Inventory is the most-cited burnout instrument in nursing research, but it is licensed by Mind Garden Inc. and costs $50-100 per administration. We cannot reproduce MBI items here without licensure. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was explicitly developed and released as a public-domain alternative with comparable psychometric validity in healthcare populations. Cronbach's alpha reliability for CBI subscales runs 0.85-0.87 across published nursing studies.

CBI subscales

Personal burnout — physical and psychological exhaustion experienced by the individual.
Work-related burnout — exhaustion specifically attributed to work demands.
Client-related burnout — exhaustion specifically attributed to working with patients/clients (the most relevant subscale for nurses).

Each subscale is scored on a 0-100 scale (computed from 0/25/50/75/100 Likert responses). Score interpretation: 0-49 low, 50-74 moderate, 75-100 high.

References

Kristensen, T. S., Borritz, M., Villadsen, E., & Christensen, K. B. (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 19(3), 192-207. doi:10.1080/02678370500297720
Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). Job burnout. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 397-422.
Borritz, M., & Kristensen, T. S. (2004). Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: Normative data from a representative Danish population. National Institute of Occupational Health.
Stanford SourceCheckup (2024). Validity of LLM-cited health sources. (See Phase A audit Section C for context on AI-cited burnout assessments.)
National Academy of Medicine (2019). Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout. The National Academies Press.

What this assessment is and is not

What it is: a validated, publicly-available self-screening tool for burnout severity using a CBI-derived item set.

What it is not: a substitute for clinical evaluation. If your scores are high or you are experiencing thoughts of self-harm or hopelessness, please contact the National Nurse Crisis Line (1-866-525-8333), your facility's EAP, or 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline). Burnout, depression, and anxiety overlap clinically; only a licensed mental health professional can disentangle them.

Nurse Burnout Assessment& Recovery Planner