Hospital healthcare workers and stress at work: Study in zagreb

Stress at work is a specific type of stress arising from the work environment. The individual's estimate of the objective situation or event greatly affects the level of stress in the individual's response. It was the aim of the study to test the sample of hospital healthcare workers on the stressors at work which they find stressful and/or greatly stressful and to establish whether there are differences in the experience of stress between physicians and nurses/lab technicians. The study was based on a sample of 1,900 participants. Of the total number of participants, 1,477 healthcare workers completed the questionnaire and the response rate was 78%. Results indicated that hospital healthcare workers experience great intensity of stress from several stressors. Among the most common for both groups were the financial and organisational factors. Physicians, as opposed to nurses and technicians, experience some of these stressors with greater intensity. At the top of the scale for most physicians are the stressors related to financial aspects of their work, organisation and inadequate workspace, whereas nurses and technicians listed inadequate (insufficient) number of workers as a stressor alongside the inappropriate financial remuneration. Nurses and technicians, more frequently than physicians, experience as stressful the fear of specific work-related dangers and harms in healthcare, indicating a need to improve education and safety measures at work. On the other hand, physicians find stressful the exposure to unjust public criticism and, much more so, the psychological pressure from the patients poorly informed and labouring under unrealistic expectations, indicating a need to improve physician-patient communication.