Professional quality of life, resilience, posttraumatic stress and leisure activity among intensive care unit nurses

Nurses working in the intensive care unit (ICU) often experience posttraumatic stress due to being exposed to pain, death, disease and surrogate trauma. Thus, it is necessary to investigate ways to enhance their coping abilities and improve their professional quality of life.

This study explores factors related to professional quality of life, resilience and posttraumatic stress of ICU nurses and provides basic data for the development of psychological support programmes to address.

The participants in this cross-sectional study consisted of 112 ICU nurses working at a general hospital in Seoul, Korea. Data were collected using self-report questionnaires on general characteristics, professional quality of life, resilience and posttraumatic stress and analysed using IBM SPSS for Windows version 25.

Professional quality of life showed a significant positive correlation with nurses' resilience, whereas posttraumatic stress was significantly negatively correlated with professional quality of life. Among participants' general characteristics, leisure activity showed the strongest positive correlation with professional quality of life and resilience and a significant negative correlation with posttraumatic stress.

This study explored the correlations among resilience, posttraumatic stress and professional quality of life of ICU nurses. Further, we found that leisure activities are associated with their higher resilience and lower posttraumatic stress.

Policy development and organisational supports are required to promote various club activities and stress reduction programmes for clinical nurses in order to increase their professional quality of life and resilience as well as prevent posttraumatic stress.