Occupational Stress and Its Related Factors in Nurses Working in Intensive Care Units of Educational Hospitals in Ahwaz, Iran

Background and objective: Nursing is an extremely stressful job and nurses face a variety of personal, organizational and communicational stresses which negatively affect their health and their job satisfaction. Accordingly, the present study was done to determine the level of job stress among nurses in intensive care units. Methods: In this analytical descriptive and cross sectional study, 175 nurses were randomly classified and studied at educational hospitals in Ahvaz in 2014. Demographic information collection tool was the job stress questionnaire of nursing by Toft Gary and Anderson. Data were analyzed by SPSS after collection by calculating descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficient. Findings: The results showed that different job opportunities have a high stress for 50.5% of nurses, average stress for 41.6% of them and only for 7.9% it has low stress. Spearman correlation coefficient expresses a significant relationship between job stress and research findings (work shift, support of managers, workload, operation of specialty tools, lack of opportunity to share problems with other personnel, uncertainty in the nursing job description, utility of working with physicians, meeting the needs of patients and their families, patient death, painful medical procedures, work as an alternative force in other wards, difficulty of working with other nurses). Conclusion: According to the deleterious effects of job stress among nurses, it is recommended that the officials to take into action to reduce stressors such as work as alternative force in other wards, uncertainty in the job description of nursing, management support.