Occupational Stress and Psychosomatic Complaints among Critical Care Nurses

Abstract

Stress among nurses is an endemic problem. Chronic stressful working environment have worst impact on physical and psychological health of nursing personals and decrease the quality of care. A descriptive study was thus undertaken to assess stress and psychosomatic complaints among staff nurses working in ICUs at Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research Center, Vallah, Amritsar (Punjab). Total 45 staff nurses were enrolled by using purposive sampling. ‘Workplace Stress Scale’ was used to assess stress and ‘Workplace symptom Scale’ used to assess psychosomatic complains among ICU’s Staff nurses. Study result shows that majority (53.3%) of staff nurses having high level of stress and around 46.7% are having average stress. There was no significant association between stress and sociodemographics variables of staff nurses. Anger was most (71%) reported workplace complaint followed by back pain (54.3%), worry (51.1%), chronic fatigue (48.9%), migraine/headache (46.7%) and stiffness in neck and shoulder (42.2%). Study reported a significant relationship between stress and workplace complaints. Though small sample size was major limitation of the study yet it implicate nurse manger and administrator to plan and implement nursing intervention to maintain positive health of staff nurses to deliver better quality of care. Health care organization should see and urgently take steps to counter these problems.

Keywords: stress, psychosomatic complaints, staff nurses