Essay On Stress In Nursing

In today’s society, we don’t realize the amount of stress we put upon each other. For those in the nursing career, the impact of this can lead to concerning issues. Although money was the number one reason most people experienced stress, the percentage of people who experience daily stress due to their work is 70%, (APA-Work Percentage, 2011). We don’t often think about the constant pressure that is placed on nurses. Consider, for a moment, a time when you were being cared for by a nurse. Now imagine the responsibility they took with you and double, or even triple it, and you will get an idea of how much pressure and stress they have in their daily job. Stress creates several concerns in a nursing career, which includes the nurse’s health, the health of the patient and their care, and the effects upon the hospital itself. With so much that is required in all these area’s the stress can literally become crippling. The sheer amount of work given to a single nurse is astounding, and most typically work twelve or more hours in a day …show more content…
Annually, a hospital will spend approximately $250 to $300 billion dollars as a direct impact from stress (Milliken, 2007). This could be the cost of therapy for stress or medications for health issues, like depression, that come from high levels of stress. Also when a hospital has high turnover rates, they are forced to contract personnel outside of the hospitals, and as mentioned before, also pay current nursing staff overtime. Since low staff numbers increases the money that it takes to hire and maintain constant nursing staff levels, there is a plummeting of care, respect, funds, and overall reputation of hospitals. The average amount of overtime that a nurse tends to work every week, is four hours, and at the point of overtime, a nurse is paid 1.5 times their base starting pay, which is an average of about $98,000 a year (KPMG,