Investigating the relationship between work-family conflict and the quality of professional life of nurses working in the ICU of hospitals affiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences in 2021-2022

Work-family conflict is the result of imbalance and incompatibility that negatively affects the health and family relationships of nurses. It creates challenges for the individual and the organization .Therefore the present study was compiled with the aim of determining the relationship between work-family conflict and the quality of professional life of special care nurses.

This is a cross-sectional descriptive study that was conductedd in 2021-2022. The research community was included the nurses working in the ICU special care department of hospitals affiliated to Golestan University of Medical Sciences. Sampling was selected as a proportional and available allocation based on the inclusion criteria from among the research population. According to the sample size formul 268 nurses were included .The data was collected using a valid and reliable questionnaire of Stamm's quality of professional life, Carison's work-family conflict and demographic information registration form. Then the data was entered into SPSS software version 18. Then according to the non-normal distribution of the data, Spearman, Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests were used. A significance level of 0.05 was considered.

The findings showed that the average age of the nurses was 31.81±7.01. The average of their work experience was 8.00±5.88. The average score of the total work-family conflict was 53.45±12.50 and it is at the average level. The average score of quality of professional life of nurses was 78.33 ± 10.57 and at a high level. Family-work conflict has a direct and significant statistical relationship with the quality of professional life of nurses working in special care (r=0.499 and p=0.000). Family-work conflict only had a statistically significant relationship with job position (p<0.05) and had no statistically significant relationship with other individual and professional variables. The quality of professional life has a statistically significant relationship only with the variables of gender, spouse's occupation, and history of underlying disease in the nurses' family (p<0.05).

Based on the findings of this study, which shows the relationship between the quality of professional life and work-family conflict in nurses working in the special care department; It can be concluded that with proper planning to increase the quality of work life of nurses, we can witness the reduction of their work-family conflict.