What can you do to ease stresses in the workplace?
Many nurses experience work-related stress, which can lead to burnout and other damaging health effects, so managers need to offer support and advice on coping
Many nurses experience work-related stress, which can lead to burnout and other damaging health effects, so managers need to offer support and advice on coping
Life can be stressful at the best of times with many of us juggling multiple demands, while trying to strike a balance between work and family commitments.
But in this current era of global financial strain and political uncertainty, the stresses feel greater than ever.
Sadly, for you and your nursing teams, stress can be a particularly common issue given the additional element of working in a healthcare service that is grappling with severe staffing shortages and heavy workload pressures.
While some stresses might be manageable in the immediate to short term, the cocktail of pressures many nurses face are not sustainable long-term and will have potentially damaging effects on the health and well-being of our nursing workforce.
Organisations need to identify staff stress and burnout and provide support
In the 2023 NHS Staff Survey, nearly 42% of respondents reported having felt unwell as a result of work-related stress.
Although this is an improvement on the almost 45% who reported this respectively the previous year, this statistic highlights the need for organisations to take action to identify burnout and stress among staff and implement measures to support them.
Our feature, Nurses under pressure: how to spot the emotional signs of stress, quotes Sarah Massie, head of staff experience at the Point of Care Foundation, who explains how the ‘magnitude of stress’ has increased recently. ‘We have gone from the pandemic and pitched straight into the longest-ever waiting lists, so it feels like a double whammy on staff.’
The article aims to help organisations and staff to spot the signs of excess stress and offers tips for combatting it.
Measures to increase nurses’ resilience and ability to cope can benefit job performance and care
Meanwhile, in our evidence & practice article, Exploring the relationships between stress, resilience and job performance among nurses in Jordan, the authors explore the relationships between stress, resilience and job performance among nurses in Jordan and many of their findings have international relevance.
- RELATED: Exploring the relationships between stress, resilience and job performance among nurses in Jordan
The study identified a slight correlation between stress and job performance. This gives further reason to implement measures to mitigate the stressors encountered by nurses.
Measures to increase nurses’ resilience and foster coping mechanisms could not only benefit their health but enhance job performance and, in turn, improve patient care.
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