Determining the Effectiveness of Stress Inoculation Training on Nurses’ Job Stress at Selected Military Hospitals

Since nursing is recognized as a stressful job, stresses caused by stressors in this profession can lead to diseases and disorders that seriously endanger the health of nurses. This study aims to help reduce nurses’ job stress by using SIT (Stress Inoculation Training), one of the methods for stress reduction and management.

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of Stress Inoculation Training on nurses’ job stress.

The present study is a quasi-experimental done on two groups (intervention and control group) with pretest and posttest intervention. The sample of the study consisted of 50 nurses working in two hospitals of 550 Army and Najai Hospital of Mashhad who met the inclusion criteria selected through random sampling. The tools used in the present study included Taft and Anderson (1981) Job Stress Questionnaire (version 57) of French et al. (2000) questionnaire to measure stress. In this study, five 2-hour training sessions were performed using SPSS 16 for data analysis. (P<0.05)

The level of initial stress in nurses was at a moderate level before the intervention and both groups were homogeneous (P=0.063). After stress inoculation training, the stress level of nurses in the intervention group decreased from 76% to 60% but statistically, the difference between the two groups was not significant and P <0.05 was considered a significant level.

The results of the present study are not consistent with those of studies on occupational stress because they were conducted based on specific discipline prevailing in military hospitals.