Stress among Anesthesiology Nurses/Technicians Working in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU): Experiences and Comparisons

The International Labour Organization (ILO, 2000) has defined stress and exhaustion from working shifts and night work, and psychological and organizational stressors conditions that create health risks for surgical nurses. Among the OR nurses/ technicians 41.9% reported that causes of their stress included inadequate teamwork, ineffective communication, and especially surgeons' negative attitudes.

The stuudie has been held in Clinical Hospital Centre Split, the sample consists of a total of 62 out of 109 possible respondents participated in the study. A total of 23 (37%) anesthesiology technicians and 39 (63%) ICU nurses / technicians participated in the survey. In the empirical part of this research, the importance of selected stressors was tested using quantitative methods in biomedicine. The existence of stress was tested by the Wilcoxon test. Stress level in the ICU was tested by T-test The analysis was elaborated in the statistical software STATISTICA 12. Conclusions were made at a significance level of 5%. The research was conducted through the questionnaire taken from the paper Milan Milošević entitled: "Development of a measuring instrument of stress in the workplace hospital health professionals and an assessment of its use value" (2010).

Based on the empirical t value of 3.42 at 59 degrees of freedom the conclusion is that there was found a statistically significant difference in the level of stressors in the workplace between nurses / technicians in the ICU and anesthesiology technicians. The conclusion was reached at an empirical level of significance <0.001.

The highest level of stress among medical staff is caused by the factor of insufficient number of employees, followed by work overload, inadequate material resources for work (financial constraints), poor organization at work, and the factor of poor communication with superiors.