ABSTRACT
Background: Nurses are a vital component of our healthcare system. Their health would directly affect the delivery of healthcare to our patients. We designed a study to look at the health status and stress levels of staff nurses in our hospital. Methods: After ethics committee approval, we enrolled 100 staff nurses working at Topiwala National Medical College & BYL Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai. A pretested semi-structured questionnaire with questions pertaining to their age, years of working experience and time taken to travel to work, and past medical history was administered. A brief clinical examination, routine investigations were performed. Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-14) was administered. Results: Maximum respondents were in the age group of 41 to 50 years, majority of them had an experience of 15-20 years working in this hospital. When asked about their preferred choice of contraceptive, tubectomy was the most common response (49.5%). 3% were suffering from asthma , 12% had tuberculosis at some point in time and 8% had needle-stick injury. Their past medical history gave us an insight into various medical conditions they were suffering from. As per Cohen’s Perceived Stress scale, 88% of the nurses were under stress. Though all those with diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma and anaemia as well as greater proportion of those with complicated pregnancies and obesity, were under stress, we could not document statistically significant relationship between perceived stress scores and the above. Conclusion: This study gives us data about the health status of nurses working in our hospital. A high proportion of the staff nurses were stressed out. Future research should focus on effective interventions to reduce the stress levels amongst nurses.