Assessment of coping strategies to lessen and control the stress used by nurses working at psychiatric wards of hospitals Baghdad City

Abstract EN

-Background: Coping is the effort to prevent or reduce threat, harm, and loss, or to diminish associated distress.

Other defines coping as a process-oriented which focuses on what the individual really thinks and acts in a specific stressful situation.

Coping is influenced by the individual's appraisal of the real demands in the encounter and resources for managing them.There are no prior assumptions as to whether it is good or bad coping because coping is simply defined as a person's efforts to manage demands, whether the efforts are successful or not.

Objectives: The present study attempts to identify the ways and levels of coping used by nurses working at psychiatric wards in Baghdad psychiatric hospitals and to find out a relationship between the levels of coping and some demographic characteristics.

Methods: A descriptive study was carried out through the period from the September 14 th to the December 18th of 2014.

A purposive sample of 90 nurses who work in psychiatric wards of Baghdad psychiatric hospitals enrolled to achieve the study objectives: AlRashad: 56, Ibn Rushid: 26 and psychiatric ward at Baghdad hospital: 8.

Brief COPE was used to determine the strategies applied by the nurses.

This inventory was modified by Carver (1997) which contains 28 items.

These items are divided in to 14 domains.

Data were analyzed using the statistical analysis program of SPSS 19th version.

Descriptive analysis: frequencies, percentages and distribution; inferential analysis: Chi2 and correlation coefficient were also applied.

Results: The results revealed that the levels of general coping was good (38.9%), medium (30.0%), and weak (31.1%) and the best level of coping was found in female nurses (24.4%), married nurses (32.2%), nurses with secondary level in nursing (24.4%), and having five years and less in psychiatric wards (23.3%).

Conclusion: the study concluded that when active coping increases, job stress decreases and support will decrease the Job stress experienced by the nurses.

Recommendations: The present study recommends that nurses working at psychiatric wards have to participate in special sessions regarding enhancement of coping skills to manage stress; and, confirm professional criteria of the relationship between nurses and other health team members during the time of working at these wards.