The impact of occupational stress on nurses’ caring behaviors and their health related quality of life

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Abstract

Background

Nursing is perceived as a strenuous job. Although past research has documented that stress influences nurses’ health in association with quality of life, the relation between stress and caring behaviors remains relatively unexamined, especially in the Greek working environment, where it is the first time that this specific issue is being studied. The aim was to investigate and explore the correlation amidst occupational stress, caring behaviors and their quality of life in association to health.

Methods

A correlational study of nurses ( N = 246) who worked at public and private units was conducted in 2013 in Greece. The variables were operationalized using three research instruments: (1) the Expanded Nursing Stress Scale (ENSS), (2) the Health Survey SF-12 and (3) the Caring Behaviors Inventory (CBI). Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed.

Results

Contact with death, patients and their families, conflicts with supervisors and uncertainty about the therapeutic effect caused significantly higher stress among participants. A significant negative correlation was observed amidst total stress and the four dimensions of CBI. Certain stress factors were significant and independent predictors of each CBI dimension. Conflicts with co-workers was revealed as an independent predicting factor for affirmation of human presence, professional knowledge and skills and patient respectfulness dimensions, conflicts with doctors for respect for patient, while conflicts with supervisors and uncertainty concerning treatment dimensions were an independent predictor for positive connectedness. Finally, discrimination stress factor was revealed as an independent predictor of quality of life related to physical health, while stress resulting from conflicts with supervisors was independently associated with mental health.

Conclusion

Occupational stress affects nurses’ health-related quality of life negatively, while it can also be considered as an influence on patient outcomes.

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Most cited references 59

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Workplace stress in nursing: a literature review.

Andrew McVicar (2003)

Stress perception is highly subjective, and so the complexity of nursing practice may result in variation between nurses in their identification of sources of stress, especially when the workplace and roles of nurses are changing, as is currently occurring in the United Kingdom health service. This could have implications for measures being introduced to address problems of stress in nursing. To identify nurses' perceptions of workplace stress, consider the potential effectiveness of initiatives to reduce distress, and identify directions for future research. A literature search from January 1985 to April 2003 was conducted using the key words nursing, stress, distress, stress management, job satisfaction, staff turnover and coping to identify research on sources of stress in adult and child care nursing. Recent (post-1997) United Kingdom Department of Health documents and literature about the views of practitioners was also consulted. Workload, leadership/management style, professional conflict and emotional cost of caring have been the main sources of distress for nurses for many years, but there is disagreement as to the magnitude of their impact. Lack of reward and shiftworking may also now be displacing some of the other issues in order of ranking. Organizational interventions are targeted at most but not all of these sources, and their effectiveness is likely to be limited, at least in the short to medium term. Individuals must be supported better, but this is hindered by lack of understanding of how sources of stress vary between different practice areas, lack of predictive power of assessment tools, and a lack of understanding of how personal and workplace factors interact. Stress intervention measures should focus on stress prevention for individuals as well as tackling organizational issues. Achieving this will require further comparative studies, and new tools to evaluate the intensity of individual distress.

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Nurse burnout and patient satisfaction.

A. D. R. Vargas Trevino, Doris Vahey, Douglas Sloane … (2004)

Amid a national nurse shortage, there is growing concern that high levels of nurse burnout could adversely affect patient outcomes. This study examines the effect of the nurse work environment on nurse burnout, and the effects of the nurse work environment and nurse burnout on patients' satisfaction with their nursing care. RESEARCH DESIGN/SUBJECTS: We conducted cross-sectional surveys of nurses (N=820) and patients (N=621) from 40 units in 20 urban hospitals across the United States. Nurse surveys included measures of nurses' practice environments derived from the revised Nursing Work Index (NWI-R) and nurse outcomes measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and intentions to leave. Patients were interviewed about their satisfaction with nursing care using the La Monica-Oberst Patient Satisfaction Scale (LOPSS). Patients cared for on units that nurses characterized as having adequate staff, good administrative support for nursing care, and good relations between doctors and nurses were more than twice likely as other patients to report high satisfaction with their care, and their nurses reported significantly lower burnout. The overall level of nurse burnout on hospital units also affected patient satisfaction. Improvements in nurses' work environments in hospitals have the potential to simultaneously reduce nurses' high levels of job burnout and risk of turnover and increase patients' satisfaction with their care.

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Work-related stress and depressive disorders.

Christopher Tennant (2001)

The 1980s and 1990s has seen a considerable change in the workforce structure in industrialised economies. Employees are commonly faced with greater demands and less job security, both of which are likely to be stressful, thus psychological disorders especially depression may increasingly be caused by work-related stressors. An issue of this journal in 1997 (Vol. 43, No. 1) was indeed devoted to stress in the workplace and since then, these workplace changes have progressed and a review seems timely. Because interpreting results of cross-sectional studies is limited by a potential reciprocal relation between work stressors and depression (since "effort after meaning" can influence how "distressed" individuals report stressors at work), this review largely focuses on prospective or predictive studies to minimise this bias. Not surprisingly, the findings from occupational stress research is consistent with the more general life event stress literature showing that specific acute work-related stressful experiences contribute to "depression" and, more importantly perhaps, that enduring "structural" occupational factors, which may differ according to occupation, can also contribute to psychological disorders. There are significant implications for employees, their families, employers and indeed the wider community.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Pavlos Sarafis: pavlos.sarafis@cut.ac.cy

Eirini Rousaki: eirrous@yahoo.gr

Andreas Tsounis: tsounis_a@yahoo.gr

Maria Malliarou: mmalliarou@gmail.com

Liana Lahana: lahana@teilar.gr

Panagiotis Bamidis: bamidis@med.auth.gr

Dimitris Niakas: niakas@eap.gr

Evridiki Papastavrou: e.papastavrou@cut.ac.cy

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): BMC Nurs

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): BMC Nurs

Title: BMC Nursing

Publisher: BioMed Central (London )

ISSN (Electronic): 1472-6955

Publication date (Electronic): 27 September 2016

Publication date PMC-release: 27 September 2016

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 15

Electronic Location Identifier: 56

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Nursing, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

[2 ]Hellenic Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Patra, 26335 Greece

[3 ]Centers for the Prevention of Addictions and Promoting Psychosocial Health of Municipality of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 54634 Greece

[4 ]Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Medical School, Thessaloniki, 54124 Greece

Article

Publisher ID: 178

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-016-0178-y

PMC ID: 5039891

PubMed ID: 27708546

SO-VID: 9515d243-6b18-4ece-9883-92cf90a25d2d

License:

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

History

Date received : 16 May 2016

Date accepted : 21 September 2016

Custom metadata

ScienceOpen disciplines: Nursing

Keywords: occupational stress,nurses,health-related quality of life,caring behaviors

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Nursing

Keywords: occupational stress, nurses, health-related quality of life, caring behaviors

The impact of occupational stress on nurses’ caring behaviors and their health related quality of life

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Abstract

Background

Methods

Results

Conclusion

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Journal of Health Sciences

Most cited references 59

Workplace stress in nursing: a literature review.

Nurse burnout and patient satisfaction.

Work-related stress and depressive disorders.

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Contributors

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