Study of occupational stress causing factors in staff of different units of legal medicine center at Iran Northwest Provinces

Stress is one of the major problems of living in industrial societies. Job and career issues are the most important causes of stress. Job stress is one of the important factors in causing psychological injury and illness in staff and decreasing productivity in organizations. Since human resources are among the most important assets of any organization, identification of the factors causing job stress is very crucial. Therefore current study aimed to investigate the causes of occupational stress in the staff of different units of the legal medicine centers in the Northwest Provinces.

A Descriptive-analytical study was conducted was designed and conducted on 166 employees of the various units of the legal medicines centers of Tabriz, Urmia, Ardebil and Zanjan cities by census statistical method during 2016-2017. Data were collected using questionnaires consist of demographic information and Cooper job stress questionnaire. The  collected  data  were  analyzed  by  means  of  SPSS  software  using  t-test  for  independent  groups,  ANOVA,  chi square, Pearson and  Spearman  correlation  coefficients, at the significant level of P<0.05.

It was found that about 50% of the staff had moderate job stress and more than 12% had severe job stress. The comparison of mean job stress between healthy and ill individuals showed that the patients had a higher mean of job stress than healthy individuals, and this difference was statistically significant (P<0.001). The study of interference between work and life issue (family) also showed that the people whose work always interferes with their life issues had higher mean job stress than the other two groups and the difference was statistically significant (P<0.001). The result of this study also showed that there is a significant direct relationship between job stress and smoking (P<0.045), work interference and life issue (P<0.001), and a significant inverse relationship (P<0.044) with literacy.  Lower incomes, shifting the place of work, the heavy work, the ignorance of the managers to work problems, dealing directly with the people, the pressures due to the completion or working against deadlines, and the lack of hope for job promotion, respectively, are the factors causing stress in the organization.

Compared with employees of other organizations, the legal medicines staff seemed to have a much higher prevalence of stress. The organizational authorities could help staff to improve the quality of life and reduce occupational stress by creating the correct communication, desirable support and generating the appropriate environment for job activities.