Occupational Stress in Acute Care Nursing

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Occupational stress statistics of nursing professionals3

Source of stress3

Availability of continuing education programs5

Testing6

Course Offerings6

Refresher Classes7

Hands-On Training7

Dealing with stress8

Professional development for nurses8

Conclusion9

References10

Occupational Stress in Acute Care Nursing

Introduction

Acute Care hospitals provide care for patients who have had a severe incident or needs care for some long term illness. This acute care may even be provided if the patient is recovering from a surgery or has a very urgent medical condition. These may be understood as health care organizations opposite to those that provide chronic care. Lately, the United States of America has witnessed a demand and supply mismatch whereby the number of people requiring acute care has increased significantly whereas the number of acute care facilities has declined as the same time. This has put pressure on the emergency hospitals which have to provide acute care in addition to emergency care.

Occupational stress is the stress that a person develops at the workplace or because of the work. This stress can be rooted in the job that is done by a person or the various situations that the job entails (Luo-Ping, 2003). The job of a nurse is also very stressful. There are various reasons for this. The paper discusses the Occupational stress statistics of nursing professionals and analysis the availability of continuing education programs for healthy coping mechanisms. Different educational strategies may be discussed which will help the nurses in coping the stress they may be facing.

Occupational stress statistics of nursing professionals

Source of stress

Overwork is one of the most common sources of stress and lack of motivation in nursing. This situation arises when the nurse has been assigned too many tasks to be performed in a certain time, or when the work is charged is above nurse's skills or knowledge. This situation is often worse when there is pressure, for example, by a delivery deadline (NICHD, 2006). A picture every day becomes more important and interesting, with fatigue, whose underlying cause is the accumulation of stress overload. It involves both physical and psychological effects and often affects the most productive employees for the company. In healthcare setting, one of the first symptoms of fatigue is the decline in job performance despite increasing working hours, all produced by exhaustion.

In addition, it is imperative to state that there are certain nurses who are not stressed because of their job. They are very satisfied and have become immune to seeing people in distress and suffering because of various forms of disease. For these nurses, the stress comes from the supervisors. They are highly dissatisfied with the way they are supervised (Scott, 2006).

For clinical practitioners each participant is asked to achieve:

by the end of the first year: 15 hours of supervision;

by the end of the second year: 20 hours of supervision;

by and the end of the third year: 20 hours of supervision.

These are usually situations where the learning alliance between the supervisor and the supervisee is not good. The purpose of assigning a professional supervisor to a ...