Reducing nurses' stress: A randomized controlled trial of a web-based stress management program for nurses

Abstract

Background Nursing is a notoriously high-stress occupation emotionally taxing and physically draining, with a high incidence of burnout. In addition to the damaging effects of stress on nurses’ health and well being, stress is also a major contributor to attrition and widespread shortages in the nursing profession. Although there exist promising in-person interventions for addressing the problem of stress among nurses, the experience of our group across multiple projects in hospitals has indicated that the schedules and workloads of nurses can pose problems for implementing in-person interventions, and that web-based interventions might be ideally suited to addressing the high levels of stress among nurses. Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the web-based BREATHE: Stress Management for Nurses program. Methods The randomized controlled trial was conducted with 104 nurses in five hospitals in Virginia and one hospital in New York. The primary outcome measure was perceived nursing-related stress. Secondary measures included symptoms of distress, coping, work limitations, job satisfaction, use of substances to relieve stress, alcohol consumption, and understanding depression and anxiety. Results Program group participants experienced significantly greater reductions than the control group on the full Nursing Stress Scale, and six of the seven subscales. No other significant results were found. Moderator analysis found that nurses with greater experience benefitted more. Conclusion Using a web-based program holds tremendous promise for providing nurses with the tools they need to address nursing related stress.

Effectiveness of stress management interventional programme on occupational stress for nurses: A systematic review

“…In spite of the effectiveness of the stress management interventional programme has been scientifically proven on reducing occupational stress as well as have been well researched internationally over many years and in a variety of settings (Fang & Li, ; Hersch et al, ; Klatt et al, ; Nazari, Mirzamohamadi, & Yousefi, ; Singh & Jain, ).…”

“…All RCTs had complex interventions including multiple components, making it difficult to declare the most effective intervention. In addition, all RCTs used different interventions, creating difficulty in establishing a comparison between occupational stress‐reducing interventions (Hersch et al, ; Singh & Jain, ).…”

“…Ten studies performed by using RCTs were included in this review (Calisi, 2017;Fang & Li, 2015;Hersch et al, 2018;Klatt et al, 2012;Kubota et al, 2016;Moody et al, 2013;Motlagh et al, 2016;Singh & Jain, 2017;Yang et al, 2018;Yousefi et al, 2015).…”

“…In terms of interventions, three of the included RCTs assessed the web-based BREATH: stress management programme, selfmanagement techniques (time management, goal setting skills, relaxation training and goal accomplishment) and a psycho-oncology training programme (Hersch et al, 2018;Kubota et al, 2016;Singh & Jain, 2017). Additionally, three RCTs considered mindfulnessbased stress reduction programmes (Klatt et al, 2012;Moody et al, 2013;Yang et al, 2018).…”

“…Ten RCTs were published from 2011 to 2018 and originated from six countries: four RCTs were conducted in the United States (Calisi, 2017;Hersch et al, 2018;Klatt et al, 2012;Moody et al, 2013), two were in China (Fang & Li, 2015;Yang et al, 2018), also, two were in Iran (Motlagh et al, 2016;Yousefi et al, 2015), one in India (Singh & Jain, 2017), one in Israel (Moody et al, 2013) and one in Japan (Kubota et al, 2016).…”