Abstract :
Background: Occupational stress is a circumstance which should be taken for serious attention, especially for hospital management to determine the regulation and draft the clinical authority of nurses to minimize the stressful condition of the nurses during their work hours. Prolonged work stress can lead to decreased consetration, increased heart rate, employment absence and decreased quality of work for nurses who can affect nursing care services in patients. Expanded Nursing Stress Scale (ENSS) is an instrumentation specifically used to assess the stress level of nurses implemented based on the special characteristics of the nurses.
Purpose: This present study aimed at assessing the stress level of the nurses in the inpatient wards of RK Charitas Hospital Palembang.
Method: The study was a descriptive survey in which the main subject, who also became the sample, was the nurses working in the inpatient wards of RS RK Charitas Palembang. 34 nurses were selected as the samples by total sampling technique met the purposive criteria.
Results: The results showed the characteristics of respondents to the average age of 32 years, the most female gender (79.4%), DIII Nursing (76.5%) and employment > 10 years (38.2%).The results showed that there were 19 nurses (55,9%) frequently possessing work stress because of the high tension on workload. Furthermore, the study found that there were 14 nurses (41,2%) being frequently stressful and 11 nurses (32,4%) always being stressful during their work.
Future recommendation: The obtained result suggested the hospital management to reexamine or review the required numbers of nurses in each inpatient ward especially in ward of Lukas.