Stress and burnout among hemodialysis nurses: a single-center, prospective survey study

Stress is a well known and identified problem within the nursing profession. Dialysis nurses are exposed to high level of stress. Increasing workload can aggravate stress and cause burnout and exhaustion. Stress and burnout are capable of having a detrimental impact on organizational productivity and pose serious health and safety hazards on the job. We aimed in this study to determine the type and level of stress and the amount of burnout among our dialysis nurses, and to evaluate the managing skills and the impact of stress on their work performance. There were 93 nurses (19 national and 74 expatriate nurses) who answered modified questionnaires to the aims of our prospective and descriptive correlational study. Our results show that most nurses involved in the study (national and expatriate) experienced a mild level of stress (79% and 68%, respectively) and moderate level of burnout (42% and 38%, respectively). The most common stressor among the national nurses was technical breakdowns of machines (15.9%) and that among expatriates was job insecurity (16.9%). The majority of the national nurses (21%) coped with this by increased sick leaves, whereas the majority (25%) of the expatriates responded by becoming easily frustrated. The most utilized coping skill among both groups was the relaxation methods (20.8% versus 24.9%) and the least utilized was denial (3.9% versus 0.5%). In conclusion, our results suggest the exposure of dialysis nurses to different types of stress and demonstrate the different experienced coping skills. These results may have implications for nursing management and hospital administration.