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INTRODUCTION

Objectives

  • Explore the stress-fatigue-burnout connection.

  • Understand organizational stress.

  • Understand the risks related to burnout.

  • Define the health concerns resulting from stress, fatigue, and burnout.

  • Define the practice considerations of managing stress.

Healthcare is an inherently stressful profession. Situations that providers of any healthcare service encounter on a regular basis are unimaginable to most people: life, death, and just about everything in between can be a “day in the life.” Only recently have some of the experiences of nurses and other healthcare providers been profiled or highlighted by the news media, television, and social media—mostly due to the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic. And most of it hasn’t been good news. Although these venues do not always provide the most factual information, they have certainly raised public awareness—both about the impact to population health as a result of poor health choices and the realities of choosing nursing or healthcare as a profession.

THE REALITY OF HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONAL STRESS

Stress at work is usually due to a number of intertwined issues. Ali et al. (2022) described the challenges for frontline nurses as the stress of taking care of patients, workload and assignments, communicating with colleagues, the nurse’s or other healthcare worker’s personal life, environment factors, emotional or physical stress, supervisory reports, community support, and problem solving, to name a few. Healthcare is a people business.

Where there are people, there will be clashes in thinking, values, and beliefs. In particular, nurses work with a variety of diverse types of people: different ethnic cultures, frames of reference, ages, faiths, educational levels, and more. The neutrality nurses and other healthcare workers must exhibit is sometimes in itself stress-producing when conflict arises and is contrary to their own feelings or beliefs. And nurses regularly play the role of peacemaker between many parties in an ambiguous industry filled with extreme chaos and change.

Dr. Hans Seyle (1956) has been credited as the first scientist to identify stress as a concept. His work, which spanned several decades beginning in the 1930s, identified stress as a difficult-to-define and subjective phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is well-known and generally understood by most people that excessive stress leads to negative physical and emotional effects on the body and mind. A number of other researchers have since studied the effects of stress on the human body, the resulting adaption or maladaptation, and the ensuing consequences of each type of stress (positive, negative, and neutral stress—called eustress). Nurses and other healthcare providers often feel stress secondary to the work environment, whether it is real or perceived.

Waddill-Goad (2013) noted previous research over a decade, including work by Wells (2011), who cited Harvey et al. (2009), as well as Mimura and Griffiths (2003), suggesting that healthcare workers experience significantly more stress in the workplace than the wider working population. Thus, they must learn to ...

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