Not much research on nurse's stress

[Larry]

Are nurses allowed to get stressed or fear parts of their job? There appears to be a dearth ( a lack) of research about this.......

My postion has changed.......in my postion in primary care.....at a moments notice we can be told to drop everything and make way for a palliative care patient to have increased support in the community. We have often to rush between the local GP and the pharmacy setting up a syringe driver and making sure that all drugs are ready, and supply equipment to the client.

At this point I get nervous.....in the community we are not an acute service...but we handle very complex cases especialli with palliative care patients. Of course we try to give a good, quality service......and be confident.

I hear colleagues feel like me.......but no-one stops to consider that we can get stressed as well.

What do you feel? Even if you don't work in the community - stress of work applies to us all.....

in general management is concentrated on policies and procedures, and although we have a professional counselling service through a private company.....management appears very distant when it comes to managers supporting nurses......

[Larry]

You're right. There doesn't appear to be a lot of research on the effects of stress on nurses and on their patient care, etc.

To my knowledge, Linda Aiken has come the closest of any researcher in addressing nurse stress (however indirectly):

http://www.nursing.upenn.edu/faculty/pubs.asp?yr1=2002&yr2=2002&pID=107

http://www.nursing.upenn.edu/faculty/pubs.asp?yr1=2001&yr2=2001&pID=107

The California Nurses Association also has some excellent articles on their website (check out Revolution Magazine--awesome).

Also, does anyone know of any research or statistics addressing how long the typical grad stays at the bedside? It has been my personal observation and experience that 5-7 years for MOST nurses seems to be the max, before they go on to something else less stressful (such as home health, health department settings, doctors' offices, or back to school for a higher level of education).

I found 150 or so articles when I typed Aitken into Ovid database for full-text articles. However a lot of them concerned nurses working in the hospital - my colleagues and I in general work on our own in a small team, working within a multi-disciplinary team. I manage a number of nurses, however I cannot find much research about burn out amongst nurse practitioners working on their own with acute dying patients and their families - we are just expected to do everything so it seems by clockwork.