[A study on job stress - making factors and their degrees of stressfulness from the nurses' viewpoint in the university hospitals of Kohgiluyeh and Boyrahmad]

ABSTRACT

Job stress is a harmful physical and mental response which is due to the interaction between the individual and his environment and lack of agreement between job requirements and the individual's abilities and desires. In addition to damaging the individual, job stress imposes overwhelming expenses on the related organizations. Nursing is one of the occupations in which people are exposed to stress and thus it adversely affects the quality of the services which they offer. So recognition of stress - making factors among nurses can serve as an effective step in determining and reducing stress. The present study was carried out in order to determine the stress- making factors and their degrees of stressfulness from the viewpoint of the nurses working in the hospitals of the University of Medical Sciences in the province. This cross sectional, descriptive, analytical study included 142 nurses who were at work when the study was carried out. A questionnaire was designed for data collection. After coding, the data were analyzed using SPSS software.The most severe stressful factors in nurses proved to be lack of consent with the rate of income [72%], high work- load [61.3], working on holidays [25.9], unacceptability of the profession in the society [51.4], and disturbance of sleep and relaxation [14.1]. Presence of new unfamiliar equipment in the environment and the nurses' lack of skill in working with the equipment [2.4] and lack of skill in the field [14.1] turned out to be the least stress making factors. A comparison between the mean score of stress making factors and the township and the hospital in which they work proved to be statistically significant [p<.004 and p<0.0001]. Spearman correlation coefficient indicated a significant relationship between the number of children and stress [p.01] and between age and stress [p< 0.007]. This study, however, showed no significant relationship between stress and factors such as sex, ward, and record of service, type of employment, status of marriage, income, and being local to the area where they work. Since stress among nurses is potentially harmful and influences their physical and mental abilities and reduces the effectiveness of the service they offer, officials should manage to reduce stress- making factors such as lack of consent with income, work load, etc