Determination of the fatigue level of nurses in intensive care

This study was did in order to determine fatigue level of nurses working in intensive care unit as a descriptive study. The sample of the study consisted of 122 nurses who work in the intensive care unit of Gaziantep University Şahinbey Research and Application Hospital between May-June 2019. Approval from the ethics committee, permission from the institution where the study would be conducted and consent from the patients were obtained before the study. Data were collected using a personal information form and the Piper Fatigue Scale that was prepared by the researchers in 15 minutes. Kolmogorov Smirnov, Shapiro Wilk, Kruskal Wallis and Mann Withney U tests were used to evaluate the data obtained. The mean age of the nurses participating in the study was 30.04 ± 5.20, 60.7% were women, 58.2% were married, 53.3% had children and 89.3% university graduates. The mean duration of the work was 89.11 ± 58.85 months and the mean duration of the work in the intensive care unit was 62.08 ± 42.71 months. It was realized that most of the nurses worked in surgical, neurology and stroke, anesthesia and reanimation intensive care units and 73.0% worked between 24:00-08:00, only 13.9% stated that they did not work overtime and 20.5% stated that they did not like his profession.It was pointed that %38,59 of cause of nurses' fatigue was shifts. When the nurses were asked how they could express their fatigue, 52.5% said that it was irritability that was a outcome of stressful working environment. When asked them what they did to manage fatigue, the most frequent (41.0%) responses were "sleep" and "rest" (41.0%) .Piper Fatigue Scale were found to be the highest in the nurses working at 24:00 - 08:00 hours. Scale total score and all subdimension scores were found to be the lowest in nurses who love their profession. In this study, the fatigue of nurses working in the intensive care unit was determined to be moderate. For this reason, it may be recommended to plan interventions to reduce the fatigue of nurses in the institution.