What are the Negative Consequences of Stress on Nurses ?
Nursing studies have firmly established that excessive exposure to psychosocial stressors produces considerable job stress, resulting in various problematic short- and long-term outcomes (Roberts, Grubb and Grosch, 2012) as the following:
Nursing studies have firmly established that excessive exposure to psychosocial stressors produces considerable job stress, resulting in various problematic short- and long-term outcomes (Roberts, Grubb and Grosch, 2012) as the following:
- Depression and sleep problems have been reported as frequent stress-related outcomes.
- Job stress has been associated with reduced job satisfaction, increased psychological distress, physical complaints, and absenteeism.
- Job stress also contributes to feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, lower self-esteem, irritability, and somatic disturbance in nurses.
- As a group, nurses tend to have higher rates of mortality and disproportionately high rates of general illness, stress-related disease, psychiatric outpatient consultation, and psychiatric admissions.
- Moral distress can arise from issues surrounding end-of-life care, depersonalizing patients on an institutional level, policy constraints, and other situations that nurses believe may affect their ability to provide quality patient care.
- Compassion fatigue has been described among cancer-care providers, emergency room personnel, chaplains, and first responders, among others. This fatigue may impact nurses in any specialty when, in the process of providing empathic support, they personally experience the pain of their patients and families fatigue.
- Burnout is another adverse consequence of stress that nurses may experience from their work. Burnout has been studied extensively by job stress researchers. Burn out has three components, namely:
- Emotional exhaustion is a feeling of being overextended, depleted of energy, and exhausted by one's work
- Depersonalization is an increased mental distance from one's job that results in an unfeeling or impersonal response toward recipients of one's service, care, treatment, or instruction.
- The final component of burnout -- reduced personal accomplishment -- is a feeling of incompetence and lack of success in one's work with people.