WORK-RELATED STRESS AND COPING STRATEGIES

ABSTRACT

Nursing profession have long been known to be highly stressful than many other occupations. The purpose of this study was to examine work related stress and coping strategies among nurses in selected hospitals in Benin City. This study was a cross-sectional research design and was conducted among a target population of 831 registered nurses across all seven (7) units of the Nursing department in UBTH as well as registered nurses across all five (5) units in Edo State Central Hospital. The proportional sampling technique was used as the sampling technique to sample two hundred and seventy-eight (278) registered Nurses across UBTH and Edo State Central Hospital, Benin City. An adapted questionnaire developed by AL-Yaqoubi and Arulappan (2022) was used to get data from the respondents, which was validated by the researcher’s supervisor. The instrument yielded reliability scores of 0.74, 0.75, 0.72 and 0.77 for sections B, C, D, and E subscales of the instrument. Descriptive statistics such as frequency distribution, percentage, mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the data obtained while t-test statistics and logistic regression statistics were used to test the stated hypotheses of the study. Results of the study showed that nurses are exposed to a number of stressors ranging from occupation-specific stressors and individual stressors to organizational stressors and task related stressors.Such stressors can affect the provision of nursing care among nurses. The study however found some effective coping strategies in solving work related stress and they include relaxation, expression of feelings, avoidance of unnecessary stress, and seeking social support. The study concluded that the subject matter of work related stress and the coping strategies must be well understood especially by nurses and managers of health care settings for the promotion of care in the healthcare domain. The study further recommended that hospital management should recruit more registered nurses as a remedy for reducing workload and clerical staff to reduce non-nursing task. Also, it is recommended that all hospitals and nursing administrators must take responsibility for the health and well-being of their staff by reducing stressful situations such as reducing the number of hours of the night shift and increasing rest time between shifts

Keywords: work related stress, coping strategies of stress, nurses, hospital.