Impact of a stress management program on stress perception of nurses working with psychiatric patients

• Psychiatric nurses perceive stress due to patients’ unpredictable behaviour and labile emotions.
• High stress perception can affect nurses physical and psychological health.
• High stress perception can affect nursing activities directed towards quality patient care.
• Stress management strategies can help moderate nurses stress perception in the work place.

Nurses caring for psychiatric patients may have to face violent emotions and unpredictable behaviour which can be quite stressful. A stress management program may equip nurses with skills to cope effectively with the stress. A one group pre-test and post-test design was adopted to test this hypothesis. Both gender nurses caring for psychiatric patients were invited to undergo 10 consecutive, one hour sessions of a stress management program. The DCL Stress scale (The De Villiers, Carson & Leary Stress Scale; Carson et al., 1997a, Carson et al., 1997b and Carson et al., 1997c) was used to collect data immediately after intervention and four weeks later. RM ANOVA with spss 16 showed that pre-intervention mean stress reduced significantly (p = 0.000) from 57.45 ± 16.42 to 41.06 ± 16.51 immediately following the intervention and 26.43 ± 12.82 (p = 0.000) four weeks after the intervention. The stress management strategies positively impacted on nurses’ stress levels.