p134: investigation of anxiety level of khatam alanbia hospital’s nurses in 2014

anxiety is a feeling of worry and excessive concern against obscure danger about inner or outer threat, which occur in form of ambiguous fear. it finally causes physical problem and impairs social and occupational functions. anxiety is the most common mental disorder. nursing totally is a difficult job and because of their working environmental and activity, they always encountering with damages arising from anxiety and it not only threaten physical and mental health, but also endanger familial, occupational and social relations. taking this matter current study aimed at finding a relationship between the nurse’s anxiety and working period to suggest solutions dealing with this problem. in order to perform this descriptive study, standard anxiety questionnaire, containing 21 questions were used. sixty nurses randomly among the morning, evening and night were selected and all data were collected. determination of anxiety level was according to questionnaire in this way: grade 0-7 none or the least, 8-15 slight, 16-25 middle and 26-36 sever. data were analyzed using spss software. the results showed that 53.3% of nurses were in the age group 25-35 and 70% married. the most nurses on night-shift work had the highest range of anxiety (89.4%) and some of them (60%) were in the middle, while none of day-shifts exposed to that much of anxiety level. chi square test indicated significant relationship between work shift and anxiety level (p=0.0001). based on the results of the present study which showed the highest range of anxiety level in nurses who works on night-shift, there are some suggestions available here: reduce working hours of night-shift’s staff based on working years, avoid obligatory overtime working, have a at least 3 hours resting in home before beginning of night-shift, bringing positive excitement into being for them like reward, encouragement and solving their problems as much as possible and finally using adaptive mechanism in order to compromise on anxiety.