[Occupational stress in intensive care nurses who provide direct care to critical patients]

In order to identify the stress level of nurses that provide direct care to critically ill patients, it was carried out a descriptive and exploratory study in five hospitals of the western region of the state of Paraná, Brazil, from May 2010 to July 2010. Fifty-eight intensive nurses participated in the study, whose stress level was evaluated according to the Domain D of Bianchi's Stress Scale. Most (65.5%) of them had medium stress levels, The stressors that obtained the highest levels were: facing death (5.6 points); answering emergency calls unit (5.1 points); caring for critically ill patients' or talking to family members of critically ill patients (both 4.8 points). It is needed to adopt stress prevention and reduction strategies to its minimization or elimination, because the main stressors mentioned are directly related to the duties of nurses.