Work Stress and Coping patterns among Nursing Academic Staff.

Abstract

Work stress has become a serious and growing problem among academic staff with several deleterious consequences. Aim of the study was to assess the work stress and coping patterns among nursing academic staff in faculty of nursing through: identifying sources, level and manifestations of stress among them, and their coping patterns which they used. Methodology The study was conducted on a group of one hundred and three academic staff who are working at faculty of nursing of Ain Shams University with different positions and departments. Data were collected through interview questionnaire sheet used to assess sources and manifestation of stress among nursing academic staff and their coping patterns. Results of this study revealed that half of academic staff suffer from high stress from workload followed by family, society, colleagues and supervisors. Also, more than two thirds of the academic staff suffer from moderate stress from work environment followed by workload and stress from students. Two thirds of academic staff had symptoms of stress which may be intellectual, physical, behavioral and emotional. But the most prevalent one among them was the emotional symptoms. academic staff used coping patterns such as setting limits of work, seeking advice and support from others, relaxation & suppression of feeling. The study recommended that the encouragement for developing stress management programs and coping strategies that can be made within the faculty of nursing that will reduce work-related stress among academic staff. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Key words: Work stress, academic staff, coping patterns.