Occupational stress negatively associated with resilience, mental health in psych nurses

For psychiatric nurses in China, occupational stress was negatively associated with psychological resilience and state of mental health, according to a study published in BMC Psychiatry.

“With multiple stressors such as high clinical workload, inadequate respect and recognition, strained nurse-patient relationships and discordant staff relationships, nurses are often overworked and overstressed, facing higher risks of suffering from anxiety and depression,” Yan-Hong Zhang, of the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Nanjing Medical University in China, and colleagues wrote.

Zhang and colleagues aimed to investigate the level of psychiatric nurses’ mental health and whether resilience plays a mediating or moderating role between occupational stress and mental health in this population.

Their multicenter, cross-sectional survey was conducted in August 2020 and included 450 psychiatric nurses across five hospitals in Jiangsu Province, China. Questionnaires were issued to all participants, with a return rate of 91.8%. The evaluation included the 35-item Chinese Nurses’ Stress Scale, the 25-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the 14-item Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale, and the 12-item General Health Questionnaire. Descriptive and Spearman correlation analyses were performed utilizing SPSS25.0 while mediating and moderating effects were performed using SmartPLS3.0.

Responses from 413 psychiatric nurses (mean age, 32.52 years; 90.1% female; 72.9% married) were included in the analysis. Participants logged a total occupational stress score of (103.29 ± 26.31), a total psychological resilience score of (79.35 ± 15.68) and a total positive wellbeing score of (46.31 ± 9.18).

Based on a dual-factor model of mental health, psychiatric nurses were found to have a low general state of mental health, with 54.5% recording positive mental health, 7% vulnerable, 21.8% symptomatic but content and 16.7% completely troubled. In addition, the researchers found that resilience played a mediating role in stress and mental health (=-0.230, 95% CI, -0.310 to -0.150) and did not play a moderating role (=-0.018, 95% CI, -0.091 to 0.055).

“In the future, hospital managers need to pay attention to the vulnerable and symptomatic but satisfied individuals in addition to the completely troubled,” Zhang and colleagues wrote.