Sources of Occupational Stress and their Relationship with Personal and Occupational Factors in Nurses of Rasht Teaching Hospitals in 2016

Nurses experience more stress than other health's staff. Job stress has significant effects on the performance of nurses and health care organizations; it also endangers the health care quality and patients' safety. The purpose of this study was to identify the sources of occupational stress and their relationship with personal and occupational factors among nurses.

This cross-sectional and analytical study was conducted among nurses in the teaching hospitals in Rasht City in 2016. The sample size was estimated based on the Cochran formula (n=250). The sample was selected via stratified randomly from the clinical wards in seven hospitals.  Data were collected by demographic questionnaire and Toft - Anderson nurses' stress scale including 34 questions in seven domains of nurses' stressors. Data were analysed with independent t, One way ANOVA, Friedman and Pearson correlation coefficient tests using SPSS   V21.0 software (Significance level <0.05).

The mean score of job stress (72.46 ± 12.47) and 77.8% of the nurses reported that their stress was at the high level. The most frequently mentioned sources of stress were related to "uncertainty in treatment", "suffering and death of patients", and "high workload". However, the least source of stress was related to "lack of support resources". There are significant differences between scores of the seven domains of occupational stress (p = 0.001). In addition, the score of job stress had no significant relationship with gender, marital status, unit type, shift type, education level, and employment type (p> 0.05). Job stress had no significant correlation with personal and occupational characteristics (p> 0.05).

Given the high levels of nurses' job stress, continuous interventions are needed to decrease the nurses' stress at the individual and organizational levels, especially in the highest sources of stress including "uncertainty about treatment" and "workload". In this regard, we recommend the following interventions at primary (related to reducing stressors), secondary (aimed at reducing nurses' response to stressors), and tertiary (focusing on specific assistance to nurses with high levels of stress) levels.