Why are you stressed at work in the hospital?

By Maryam GILANI

When I worked in the hospital as an environmental health expert, I noticed that my coworkers, most of all nurses have a problem to maintain a balance between their work and their private life. I was always interested in finding a way to help them. Now, Glad I have some information in this case that I can share with you.

Did you know that symptoms like heart disease, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological and mental diseases, absenteeism and displacement, increased waste, and accidents etc, are related to stress and occupational burnout?

Job stress, occupational burnout and ways to deal with it

 What is a burnout?

Burnout is a damage to mental health that is formed in connection with the job and is divided into three categories:

1-Emotional fatigue: Emotions that are quite like stress and the feeling of being under pressure and losing emotional resources.

2- Professional personality change: that is a negative and cruel response to people who are usually receiving service from the individual. This aspect refers to a person's negative perception of others.

3-Decreased personal performance: this is a decrease in competence in performing personal duties and is a kind of negative self-evaluation in relation to work in the hospital shift system, whose symptoms are exhaustion, boredom, isolation, mental illness, physical illness, and many others. (Pains, Arnson, & Kafry, 2002). 

I often heard hospital staff, especially nurses in different wards, talking about depression and excessive tiredness, reluctance to work and loss of motivation. Several times, I even witness some of them ignoring patients’ demands and behaving indifferently. I once heard about a young nurse who worked there for about two years. At first, she was very active, but after a year, her performance had deteriorated, causing other colleagues and patients to complain. The above three categories are the reasons for this.

Are stress and occupational burnout to affect hospital staff productivity?

Health professions, especially nurse are very challenging jobs due to their rapidly changing nature and the different occupational groups in the workplace that one must deal with. Most importantly, the nursing profession requires constant attention, care and tolerance for patients who are in crisis (Mc Allister and McKinnon, 2009). Understanding the detrimental outcomes of the hospital working burnout processes is important for enhancing the hospital staffs. Nevertheless, little is known about how to prevent these burnout processes.

Is there a way to reduce the damage caused by stress? Resilience and stress reduction methods can prevent problems.

Resilience is the capacity to withstand difficulty and the ability to repair oneself. Resilience is a trait that varies from person to person; can change over time, it can increase or decrease and its formation is based on human intellectual and practical self-correction in the process of trial and error in life. Those who have studied resilience in the social sphere believe that resilience is not just about resilience to injury or crisis. they consider resilience as the ability of a person to maintain bio-psychological balance in dangerous situations (Connor and Davidson, 2003). this is a participation an active and productive individual in the environment, In addition, researchers believe that resilience is a form of self-healing with positive emotional, cognitive, and cognitive consequences. Resilience is a return to the original structure or reaching a higher level (in threatening conditions), thus providing a successful adaptation in life (Momeni, KH.M & Alborzi, M & Atashzadeh shorideh,2010).

Stress and burnout in nurses lead to reduced attention to the patient, absenteeism and leaving the job, and ultimately reduced care of patients (Tubaei, 2006). Accordingly, to maintain and ensure mental health in hospital staff, especially nurses, apart from reducing stressful sources and more importantly, attention has been focused on creating and strengthening resilience and resilient behaviors in them. Accordingly, Jackson et his team have proposed ways to increase resilience behaviors in this area and they have developed resilience training programs for nurses in ten stages (Jackson, D Fritko, A, & Eden borough, M, 2007).

CONCLUSION

According to the measures taken to identify and reduce stressors in nurses and hospital staff unfortunately, these measures are still not sufficient and efficient, and focus more on organizational and managerial activities and external factors than the mental health of staff, so that nurses have inevitably suffered from the stress of burnout and inattention, so in many cases, experienced staff leave the medical centers. As a result, these centers recruit staff who do not have the necessary experience to take on a sensitive nursing job. Therefore, to maintain and ensure mental health in nurses, apart from reducing stressful resources and more importantly, the focus has been on creating and strengthening resilience and resilient behaviors in nurses.  Which is necessary for success in the nursing profession. (Thabiti, H & Soliman Nejad, A, 2017).

 

References

Conner, K., M, & Davidson J. R. T. (2003). Development of a new resilience scale: The Conner Davidson resilience scale (CD-RISC). Depression and Anxiety, 18 (2), 76-82.

Jackson, D Fritko, A, & Eden borough, M. (2007). Personal resilience as a strategy for suiving and thriving the face of workplace adversity: a literatury review. Journal of Advanced Nursing (60)1, 1-6.

Mc Allister, McKinnon, J (2009). The importance of teaching and learning resilience in the health disciplines; Acritical review of the literature. Nurses Education Today;29: 371-379.

Momeni, KH.M & Alborzi, M & Atashzadeh shorideh, F, [Perisian],2010, Relationship between resilience and burnout in nurses, medicine and cultivation, 29, 37-47.

Pines, A., Aronson, E., & Kafry, D. (2002). Burnout: From Tedium to Personal Growth. New York: Free Press.

Thabiti, H & Soliman Nejad, A, [Perisian] (2017), Resilience and burnout in hospital staff, Contemporary Psychology, 12, (Suppl.), 446-450.

Toubaei A, S, [Burnout and job satisfaction of nurses working in internal, surgery, psychiatry burns and bum wards [Perisian] 2006, Journal of Ofoyh Danesh, Gonabad. 12 (4) 40-46.