Determination of anxiety levels of nurses in intensive care units and their reasons

ABSTRACT Determination of Anxety Levels of Nurses in Intensive Care Units and Their Reasons Stress and anxiety affect human life at various levels. Stress is an organism's reaction to protect itself when its physical and psychological borders are threatened and/or pushed to limits. Anxiety on the other hand refers to feeling of discomfort and restlessness due to expectation of an unknown and incomprehensible threat When a person feels anxiety continuously, he/she develops physical, mental, and social problems. In order to provide first-rate nursing care, nurses must be healthy individuals physically, psychologically, and socially. In particular, recovery of intensive care patients are directly affected by quality of intensive care nursing services which is closely linked to lowering the anxiety levels of the nurses. It covers 120 day-time nurses working in the intensive care units of Balcah Hospital of Çukurova University's Faculty of Medicine, Adana Numune Training and Research Hospital of Turkish Ministry of Health, and Adana Research and Practice Hospital of Başkent University. Data have been collected on the basis of State-Trait Anxiety Inventory that is useful to measure socio-demographic characteristics, situations, and anxiety levels of the nurses in the intensive care units. Date has been analyzed, by utilizing SPSS for Windows, to obtain results for K Square, Pearson, Spearman Mann- Whitney, T-Test, and Oneway-Annova Test. The nurses' average age was 27.3, and their average length of professional experience was 73. Seventy five percent of the nurses graduated from Vocational Schools; 37.5 percent of them lived with their spouses and children; 69.2 percent indicated their level of income as middle; 51.7 percent informed that they became nurses as a result of a conscious career choice; and 75.8 percent stated that they enjoy practicing nursing. In addition, 233 percent of them were working in intensive care units for children; 56.7 percent had an intensive care unit experience of 1-3 years; 72.5 percent indicated satisfaction with working in the intensive care units; 55.8 percent declared that they worked in the intensive care units willingly; and 96.7 percent believed that working in intensive care units increased their levels of anxiety. The study shows that average situational anxiety score is 43.9+-9.S whereas average continous anxiety score is 44.5+-8.4. It also indicates that situational and continous anxiety scores are not correlated with age, total years of nursing experience, years of intensive care unit experience, and number of weekly working hours. However, the study also demonstrates that there is a statistically significant relationship between situational and continous anxiety scores on the one hand and enjoying the nursing practice on the other. These study shows that the nurses on average have middle-level anxiety, and those nurses that enjoy their professional practice and that work in intensive care units tend to have higher anxiety levels. After evaluating the results, the study suggests recommendations on ways of reducing the anxiety levels of nurses, and thus improving the quality of nursing care. Key Words: Nursing, Stress, Anxiety, Intensive Care Units XII