Survey Results of the New Health Care Worker Study: Implications ...

386. Occupational Health as Affecting Nurses and HospitalsAs presented in Figure 1, nurses’ emotional and physical occupational health affects theircommitment, satisfaction, absenteeism, and retention. We now turn to these factors.Stress and burnout affect nurses’ decisions to stay with the employing hospital,absenteeism, commitment to their career and to their employing hospital, and job satisfaction. Inthis section we first examine stress and burnout constructs in detail.The changing work environment affects both mental and physical health outcomes ofnurses. We examine the diagnosed health problems of nurses, with a particular focus on whetherthey have musculoskeletal disorders.6.1. StressIn the first measure of stress, respondents were asked to describe overall how stressfultheir lives are on a 5-point scale from 1 = not at all stressful to 5 = very stressful. The samequestion was repeated about their jobs. For the question about life stress, 24% of respondentsrated their lives as stressful or very stressful. The nurses rated their jobs slightly more stressfulthan their lives. Almost one-half of the nurses (48%) rated their jobs as stressful or very stressful.In the second measure of stress, respondents were presented with 14 symptoms of stress.These items were based on a scale created by Denton et al. (2002). Nurses were asked (on a 5-point scale ranging from 1= none of the time to 5 = all of the time) how often they felt this wayduring the past month. The symptoms of stress scale was obtained by summing the 14 stresssymptoms to form a stress scale. Stress scores ranged from 14 to 70 with higher scoresindicating higher levels of stress. The average of stress scale was 32.4 (std. dev. = 7.9), withCronbach’s alpha = .87, indicating good internal reliability of the stress scale. The mean for thesymptoms of stress indicates that nurses are feeling stressed. The most frequently reported