Occupational Stress in the Healthcare Workplace

Running head: OCCUPATIONAL STRESS IN THE HEALTHCARE WORKPLACE
Occupational Stress in the Healthcare Workplace
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

OCCUPATIONAL STRESS IN THE HEALTHCARE WORKPLACE 2
Occupational Stress in the Healthcare Workplace
Introduction
Healthcare professionals do a phenomenal job at ensuring that individuals receive the
best care. They deal with varied cases each day. Sometimes, they work for long hours due to
many patients/clients. As many other people, health professionals also experience stress
while at work. Stress is state where there is emotional or mental straining brought about by
extreme or demanding circumstances (Baum, 2016). While stress has been an issue that
people must deal with throughout history, stress among health professionals has uniqueness.
The causes of stress are referred to as stressors. In the contemporary society there are newer
and unique stressors in the field of health. This means that although healthcare professionals
experienced stress even in the 20th century and before, the kind of stressors keep evolving
with time. The 21st century has seen great technological advancement in many fields
including the healthcare field. This has brought great benefits but also negative ones such as
stress. As Selye (2013) observes, occupational health and safety of workers is key in
determining their output. This review is going to look at stress in the healthcare field/sector.
More precisely, the following are going to be discussed: how stress manifests itself in this
field and how it may cause harm, legislative requirements relating to stress among healthcare
workers and standard industry practice relating to minimization of stress.
How stress manifests itself in the healthcare field
There are different workers in the healthcare sector. These include doctors, nurses,
pharmacists, nutritionists and medical technologists. During their work, these members of the
healthcare team may experience stress in various ways and due to various reasons. According
to Roberts, Sim, Black and Smith (2015), one of the ways in which stress manifests itself is

OCCUPATIONAL STRESS IN THE HEALTHCARE WORKPLACE 3
through difficulty in staying focused and poor problem-solving skills. This is a situation that
may result where a healthcare professional works for long hours without taking a break.
Sometimes the job is too demanding leading to such kind of working. When a healthcare
professional works for long hours without taking a rest, they develop fatigue. It is the
continuous state of being in fatigue that causes stress leading to poor problem-solving skills
and difficulty in staying focused.
Another common way through which stress manifests itself among healthcare workers
is through drug and substance abuse. Drug and substance abuse refers to regular consumption
of such substances as alcohol, heroine, cocaine and smoking tobacco. When this happens
regularly, addiction may result. With addiction, it becomes a very difficult task to quit
abusing the drugs. Certain working factors may lead to stress compelling a healthcare worker
to abuse drugs. These include continuously having high loads of work, dealing with patients
who are dying/the terminally ill and insufficient preparation to handle the job demands
(Adriaenssens, Gucht, and Maes, 2015). Drug abuse leads to a contemporary feeling of
pleasure but once cleared from the body, the initial status resumes and may be worse this
time. This a main indicator of stress and may lead to other negative behaviours such
absenteeism from work, deterioration of performance and inability to beat deadlines.
The third and final way through which stress may manifest itself among healthcare
workers is through deteriorating of their health. Extensive research has shown that there
exists a relationship between stress and weakening of the immune system (Nowrouzi et al,
2015). When the immune system become weak, an individual is more prone to disease
causing pathogens. They are therefore at an increased risk for infections. This explains how
the deterioration of health status occurs (Siegrist and Wahrendorf, 2016). Increased levels of
stress (chronic stress) has been implicated in development of some mental disorders such as
depression. As indicated by Lovallo (2015), in extreme cases it may lead to adverse