Occupational Stress Issues In Nursing

OCCUPATIONAL STRESS ISSUES AMONG NURSES

The health care industry has had to deal with occupational stress factors over a long period of time. Studies have shown that, over time, health care workers are higher up the ladder with issues related to substance abuse, suicide and elevated forms of depression and anxiety linked to occupational stress. In addition to the aforementioned psychological factors, burnout, absenteeism, reduced patient satisfaction and treatment/ diagnosis errors are also resulting outcomes of occupational stress.

Nursing is generally perceived as a very demanding profession. Along with the increased demand and progress in the nursing profession, there has also been an increase in stress levels of nurses who usually experience

Nurses are exposed to multiple stressful demands and pressures from workplace, family, and other factors as represented by Ostelle in the transactional model of stress and health and are therefor at very high risk of an array of safety, health and other issues. Nurses confront a range of occupational health and safety (OHS) risks in their roles of providing care and comfort to the sick and aged. While much has been done to identify and control the physical risks associated with nursing work, such as manual handling, ergonomics, chemical and biological hazards, not much has been achieved in successfully recognising the very real psychological risks encountered by

Excessive workload demands that the person cannot meet. Long work hours, excessive patient load. Quantitative overload is defined when there are too many things do in the allotted time. Competing priorities

Demands that exceed the person’s ability (e.g., task is too complex, too demanding).

Or qualitative underload, when the tasks that the nurse is required to complete are too simple, not challenging enough

Process of dying, assisting the dead, death, resuscitation, and taking people off of life support Time pressure

Readiness, preparedness

Human services

Certain types of tasks

Fulfilling expectations Sense of being under time pressure, sense of not being able to have a break, being on call

Subjective feelings of constant readiness, preparedness because something might happen. Does not necessarily have to mention the looming threat, it is enough if the sense of readiness is