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Risk Assessment of Intensive Care Stressors and Coping with it among Critical Care Nurses

Background: Nurses play an important role in today’s health care system. They constitute the largest health care occupation .The right to work in a safe and healthy environment is a fundamental right for every worker .Nursing is a highly stressful profession. Objectives: 1-to inquire about sources of work stress among nurses in critical care work 2-to assess the extent of stress predictors risk among nurses working in critical care work 3to discover adopted style of coping among those nurses 4To increase nurses awareness about varieties of coping especially constructive coping through health education intervention. Subjects and Methods:An intervention study was conducted on 80 nurses working in the internal medicine intensive care units (ICU) of Zagazig University Hospitals and included two parts: 1-descriptive part: a pre-constructed questionnaire included: causes, frequency and details of their work, stress predictors in the ICU work, their adopted coping style, data for calculation of nurses work load. and lastly, a pre-test (about their basic knowledge about coping) was distributed followed by the post test three months later. 2Intervention part: through health education about scientific definitions and concepts of coping strategies and its scales especially adaptive coping. Results:Most of nurses were married females distributed nearly equally between different age groups, majority of them were qualified by technical diploma grade, spending <5 years in emergency departments and 85% of them perceived ICU work as a stressful job. Perception of work stress increases in married females of younger age group <35y, technical diploma nurses of <5 years duration of employment and higher workload (60-69).Risk assessment of ICU work stressors pointed to work load & high nurse /patient ratio as the most risky parameter of stress followed by dealing with critically ill patients. Adopted coping strategies centered in mal-adaptive coping i.e. venting emotions (35%), religion adherence (23.75%) and then problem solving (18.75%).After introduction of the health education message, there was an improvement in their knowledge about all parameters of coping strategies, expecting better attitude and performance of coping strategies. Conclusion and recommendations: It was concluded that feeling of stress among critical care nurses is precipitated by several work place factors. Work overload and dealing with patients relatives could be prioritized first (according to its risk weights and liability for solving) to be managed at the administrative and individual levels through development of the work policy and application of effective coping approaches.