Background: Nurses form an essential constituent of the health-care system. During the fulfilment discharge of their duties, nurses experience various types of work-related injuries and stress, which harmfully impacts their health and nursing quality.
Objective: To estimate the prevalence of work-related injuries among nurses and to find the stress level among nurses.
Materials and Methods: A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted by selecting participants through simple random sampling technique. A total of 185 nurses with minimum 3 years of working experience in the same hospital were included in this study. The duration of work, type of injuries, time spent in direct patient-care activities within working hours, and various other factors such as job stress were assessed.
Result: Needlestick injury was reported in 5.4% of nurses while working in last 1 year, whereas 19.5% nurses experienced varicose veins. Hospital-acquired infections were encountered by 7.4% of nurses. Occasionally stressful situation was reported by 56.9% of nurses, followed by 35.9% nurses being frequently stressful while working in the hospital. The most stressful situation for the nurses was to deal with violence/abuse from patients with mean of 2.3 and standard deviation 0.91 measured on 4-point scale. Moreover, the least stressful situation was difficulty in working with a particular nurse, with mean of 1.56 and standard deviation 0.70.
Conclusion: Appropriate training and awareness should be given to the nurses to develop skills to deal with work-related injuries and stress during their nursing education.
Key words: Nursing professional, needlestick injuries, hospital-acquired infections, stress
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