Critical Care Nursing Stress

Working in any area of a hospital can be a very stressful experience. However, when working in areas such as the emergency room or the intense care unit, patients require a greater level of care and can take a turn for the worse in a heartbeat. These situations can require immediate response by the nursing staff and can often cause high stress levels.

Staffing Issues

• Many critical care nurses will experience stress when the staffing for the unit is less than desirable, such as being short on experienced nurses. If the unit is short-staffed, nurses may take on more patients to care for than usual.

Overtime

• Critical care nurses may find themselves burned out and stressed when working overtime due to nursing shortages.

Code Situations

• Often, critical care nurses are expected to respond to codes on other floors of the hospital. They are dealing with patients who they have no knowledge of whatsoever and are using standard protocol to help revive them.

Primary Care

• Since any critical care nursing area requires more care by the nursing staff, nurses are often required to give primary care to patients, which includes bathing, feeding and turning them. Other departments usually have nursing assistants to perform these tasks.

One-on-One Care

• In the critical care setting, nurses may be required to provide one-on-one care to certain patients, such as patients on ventilators or suicide risks. Such patients may be time-consuming or combative. A nurse may have to care for this patient several days in a row to provide continuity of care, thus causing stress on the nurse.

Admissions

• Often, critical care patients are very sick and require a variety of nursing care from all staff. Combining that level of care with incoming admissions may create stress for nurses, who are trying to settle new patients, keep them stabilized and deal with other sick patients all at the same time.