Abstract
Nurses’ roles expose them to a lot of stress based upon the physical labour, exposure to human suffering, lengthy work hours, poor staffing, and interpersonal relationships that are central to the work they do. Nurses are expected to deliver humane, empathetic, culturally-sensitive and proficient care in working environments with limited resources and increasing responsibilities. Such imbalance between providing high quality care with limited resources leads to physical and mental stress. This stressful nature of nursing can ultimately lead to job dissatisfaction and burnout which among health care providers are important issues since they affect turnover rates, staff retention and ultimately the quality of patient care. A thoroughly validated self developed questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of 0.78 was used to explore the effect of work environment on the level of work stress and burnout among nurses. A purposive sampling technique was utilized to select 100 participants from the medical unit of the hospital. Three hypotheses were tested at a significant level of 0.05. Data were analyzed using ANOVA and Pearson’s Correlation. The study revealed that level of stress was higher among the staff nurses who had worked for only between 0 and 3 years, with mean stress score 46.0000. Findings further revealed that as the cadre rose, the nurses assumed that managerial roles were accountable for increased subordinates and oversee health related and administrative responsibilities and they experienced more stress. Also there is a significant relationship among work environment, stress and burnout among the nurses in the selected unit. In conclusion, though work conditions and environment are not favourable, there are job security and good interpersonal relationship among the nurses which cushion the stressful situations. It is therefore recommended that the management of the hospitals should provide a conducive work environment, providing necessary resources and adequate break periods to ensure staff welfare.
Highlights
Every work environment especially within a hospital setup needs to be conducive, friendly and stress free to promote quality care and wellbeing of health care workers whose job demands are increasing day by day
The study utilized a descriptive design to explore the role of work environment and conditions on the level of work stress and burnout among nurses in medical unit of University College Hospital (UCH) The Medical Unit is made up of 7 wards, rendering nursing care to both male and female clients on admission in the hospital receiving medical and long term care for acute and mostly chronic illness that does not require surgical intervention
Since 100 was the minimum sample size that can be studied, the researcher decided to increase the power of significance by including all the nurses in the Medical Unit who are involved in direct nursing care of patients and are willing to participate in the study in the sample frame, they were 110
Summary
Every work environment especially within a hospital setup needs to be conducive, friendly and stress free to promote quality care and wellbeing of health care workers whose job demands are increasing day by day. Nurse’s role has long been regarded as stress-filled based upon the physical labor, human suffering, work hours, staffing, and interpersonal relationships that are central to what the work nurses do [6] This stressful nature of nursing can lead to job dissatisfaction and burnout [7]. This is more so because nurses are expected to deliver humane, empathetic, culturally sensitive, proficient and moral care, in working environments with limited resources, reduced supply of nurses and increasing responsibilities Such imbalance between providing high quality care within an environment of limited resources leads to stress [11].
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