Nurses' Mental and Physical Health: Challenges and Implications - Research Paper

Introduction

Most people consider nursing as the best profession and highly fulfilling. But, the way the healthcare is complicated together with the huge amount of work being done has greatly influence the mental and the physical health of nurses in unfavorable way. For instance, nurses face depression and insomnia. These health challenges lower the performance of nurses and consequently raise the prevalence of factors which have an impact on the safety of patients (Fu et al., 2018).

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Nurses faced several challenges like compassionate fatigue. According to Fu et al., (2018), compassionate fatigue is the negative outcome due to prolonged caring of sick people. The term refers to a situation where nurses are disrupted by the mental and physical signs of patients. Therefore, they end up experiencing health-associated illness such as stomachache, headache, and other factors such as loss of empathy, social isolation, feeling that life is unfair, and emotional breakdown. All these factors would then translate to an upsurge in absenteeism (Fu et al., 2018).

Effects of Working Standards on the Physical and Mental Health of Patients

Working standard is the working surrounding together with all the factors that influence the performance of employees in the work setting. Some of these factors are legal rights and obligations, physical aspect, and job hours. Nurses work in a challenging environment which is not satisfying and not favorably hence experience a negative impact on their health. The factors that result in physiological problems among nurses are hostile surrounding, too much work pressure, and excessive working hours. These factors cause back pain disorder, soreness of the muscles, general fatigue, headaches, eye strain, and fatigue associated with the eyes. Excessive working hours and unfavorable working standards interfere with biological rhythm and physiological working of the body. Moreover, it promotes stress.

Stress experienced by nurses from their job usually results in psychological grief, lower self-esteem, exhaustion, illness, and a decline in performance and efficiency. Moreover, it promotes increased frequency of absenteeism, high rate of staff turnover, and depression. Inadequate support of nurses from their working setting broadens job dissatisfaction and anxiety. Nurses who work on night shifts experience confusion and exhaustion. The night duties interfere negatively with their social life, physiological, and mental. Furthermore, night's shifts work increases the level of accidents in hospitals. A more worrying scenario is the fact that nurses who consistently work in night duty are most likely to suffer from breast cancer.

Another factor which has interfered with the health of nurses is the job demands. Job demand is the institutional features of the job that need skills and effort and is linked to the specific psychological and physiological cost; For instance, too much work pressure, unsuitable physical environment, and irregular working hours. These factors usually contribute to job stressors, because, to achieve these demands may entail intense effort which workers might not achieve. Hence, results in the depletion of physical and mental resources in addition to the development of burnout among workers leading to deterioration in health.

Other factors that have contributed immensely in lowering the health of workers are the furniture that nurses used in their working environment. It has been established that the furniture found in the most hospital are unsuitable since it interferes with different muscles, spinal disc, and spinal cord leading to the development of back pain. Also, restroom contributed to the deterioration in the health of nurses since most hospitals lack rooms where nurses can comfortably rest in case of headache and tiredness (Ferdoos, Malik, Ashiq, & Hussain, 2016).

According to Perry, Lamont, Brunero, Gallagher, and Duffield (2015), nursing as a profession is quite burdensome both emotionally and professionally. Therefore, nurses face a challenge of mental wellbeing, which is featured by common mental disorders and decreasing vitality. These challenges have translated to declining productivity, frequent absenteeism from the duty, and presenteeism. The causes of CMD and low vitality are contributed from institutional factors such as inadequate support services to nurses, stressing factors emanating from the workplace, and little reward despite doing too much work. Other factors are role conflict, violence from the workplace, too much expectation from nurses, rotational shifts which lead to lack of enough sleep, and high mortality rate which results in trauma among nurses (Perry et al., 2015).

Therefore, employers should be well conversant with the mental challenges in the nursing sector to enable them to identify earlier symptoms and institute the necessary measures. In an acute teaching hospital setting, nurses have indicated to have suffered from anxiety and depression to the extent that they have taken psychoactive medicines. Moreover, they have suffered from disorders linked to eating, extreme tiredness, alcohol consumption, smoking, headache, and aggression which are signs of mental health. These mental health symptoms have caused a devastating impact on hospitals like reduction in the safety of patients and satisfaction, persistent increase in errors related to medication and clinical, and near misses (Perry et al., 2015).

Mitigating Mental Health Among Nurses

To minimize the stress that has been experienced among nurses, the hospitals need to undertake induction training which has been proved to lower the level of stress and boost their entire health. Training of nurses is fundamental since it improves their prolonged stay and their dedication to work in their hospital setting. Moreover, they will be more satisfied with their work. Stress-related to occupation has resulted in a desire by nurses to leave the workplace. Furthermore, inductions minimize the psychological costs linked to nursing work since they promote positive cognitive inference and reactions to challenging workplace experiences.

When nurses are inducted about their dual diagnosis, suicide risk evaluation, and mental health risk assessment, it would help them to gain in-depth knowledge on the symptoms and initiators; hence enabling them to assess their mental well-being and hinder triggers of stress. Inductions like carer support tend to uplift awareness concerning the mitigation of psychosocial risk when doing a job in healthcare. For nurses to understand the effect of work and other nonclinical factors on health, the hospital management should allow the staff to undergo CPA induction (Kamau, Medisauskaite, & Lopes, 2015).

According to Perry et al., (2015), hospitals should concentrate on giving nurses support service like workers screening, counselling, wellness programs, and create high-level mental health literacy among the supervisors. The high literacy level will aid them in identifying CMDs and low vitality among workers. According to Noben et al., (2015), regular screening should be done among the nurses to evaluate early symptoms of mental health among the nurses by using World Health Surveillance (WHS). The aim of this strategy is to hinder further deterioration of health and boost job performance. The employers benefit from early screening since the productivity would be elevated because nurses would not miss job and presenteeism would be eliminated. Furthermore, it increases revenue generation from the hospitals since frequents sickness would reduce, and workers would stay more at the hospital (Noben et al., 2015).

Conclusion

Nurses are essential in the healthcare industry since they contribute significantly to the quality care of patients. Therefore, for hospitals to succeed in their quest for quality care and treatment, they should improve on the mental and physical health of their nurses. Improving mental and physical health of nurses can be achieved by engaging them in early screening, counselling, wellness programs, and induction training. These programs would enable nurses to reduce mental health, decrease clinical and medication errors, and increase their productivity. Furthermore, future mental challenges among nurses in hospitals would decline, and negative impacts on the running of the hospitals' services would be insignificant.

References

Ferdoos, A., Malik, H., Ashiq, A., & Hussain, M. (2016). IMPACT OF WORKING CONDITIONS ON THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH OF NURSES. Pakistan Journal of Women's Studies= Alam-e-Niswan= Alam-i Nisvan, 23(1), 23. https://search.proquest.com/openview/f7986270d140cc1e6c33f014e3f9f615/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40072

Fu, C. Y., Yang, M. S., Leung, W., Liu, Y. Y., Huang, H. W., & Wang, R. H. (2018). Associations of professional quality of life and social support with health in clinical nurses. Journal of nursing management, 26(2), 172-179. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jonm.12530

Kamau, C., Medisauskaite, A., & Lopes, B. (2015). Inductions buffer nurses' job stress, health, and organizational commitment. Archives of environmental & occupational health, 70(6), 305-308. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19338244.2014.891967

Noben, C., Evers, S., Nieuwenhuijsen, K., Ketelaar, S., Gartner, F., Sluiter, J., & Smit, F. (2015). Protecting and promoting mental health of nurses in the hospital setting:Is it cost-effective from an employer's perspective? International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health, 28(5), 891-900. https://doi.org/10.13075/ijomeh.1896.00465

Perry, L., Lamont, S., Brunero, S., Gallagher, R., & Duffield, C. (2015). The mental health of nurses in acute teaching hospital settings: A cross-sectional susrvey. BMC Nursing, 14(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-015-0068-8