An evaluation of the emotional strain on emergency nurses and investigation of their emotional management skills

Emergency care departments are the healthcare units whereseveral patients presenting with various complaints are treated, critical decisions on patients' lives are made in relativelyshorter periods of time, and relatively higher rates of mortalityhas been reported. Therefore, they represent a highly stressfulunit to work at for the staff. The emergency care staff usuallycannot meet their physiological needs even for food and fluidintake and experience fatigue at the levels of burnout, leadingto the development of stress. On the other hand, the patientswho presented with critical conditions at the emergencydepartments cause their families, relatives, and friends toexperience ambiguity, anxiety, and fear. Accusations andverbal or physical violence may readily be provoked amongthe significant others of patients against the emergency staffdue to higher expectations of the outcomes of the treatment, financial problems, and failure to save the lives of the patientsdespite the provided treatments. Moreover, the levels of aggression may increase when the staff's fatigue, stress, failure to indulge, and inability to tolerate are built upon thegrounds of these untoward conditions. This present study was conducted as a descriptive trial todetermine the positive and negative emotional strain of emergency nurses and to examine their emotionalmanagement skills on 30 nurses working at the emergencydepartment of Suruç County Public Hospital on the datesbetween 10.02.2017 and 10.08.2017. The data collection wasperformed using the "Sociodemographic CharacteristicsInquiry Form" developed by the investigator and using the"Emotion Management Skills Inventory" and the"Positive Affect-Negative Affect Scale". The data wereevaluated with SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciencefor Windows) 18.0 software package. The descriptive datahave been presented as means and percentiles. When the dataconformed to a normal distribution, the intergroupcomparisons between the demographically created groups(gender, civil status, etc.), were performed using thesignificance test for the difference between the two means(Independent Samples T-test). When the data did not conformto a normal distribution, the Mann-Whitney U-Test andKruskal Wallis Test were used for the analysis. A level of p<0.05 was accepted as the level of statistical significance. The study resulted in a higher Mean Negative Body Reactions Score in the male nurses (13.50 ± 2.78), the nurses who did not purposefully choose the profession (13.67 ± 2.18), and who had never participated in any continuous professional education (14.50 ± 2.889). The mean score of the verbal expression sub-scale was higher among the nurses who were assigned especially to the department they worked for (24.44 ± 5.04). The differences between the groups were found to be statistically significant. The assessment of the Positive-Negative Emotion Scale demonstrated that the Mean Positive Emotional Load Scores were higher among the college-graduate nurses (46.67±19.40). The Mean Negative Emotional Load Scores were higher in nurses who regularly worked at night shifts (38.00 ± 14.14). The differences between the groups were found to be statistically significant. Keywords: Emotional Management Skills, Positive-Negative Emotions, Nurse