Occupational Stress and Associated Factors among Nurses working in Public Hospitals of Arsi Zone, Oromia Regional State, Central Ethiopia, 2018

Nursing, by its nature, is an occupation subject to a high degree of stress. This profession involves working with people who are themselves suffering a considerable degree of stress. Occupational stress compromised quality of service delivery and also leads as employees’ burnout, turnover and absenteeism. The Objective of the study is to determine the level of occupational stress and associated factors among nurses. The study employed facility based cross sectional study was conducted from August 13 –September 02, 2018. All nurses who served at least for 6 months in Arsi zone public hospitals were asked using self-administered structured questionnaire. The collected data was checked manually, edited, coded and entered into Epi-data version 3.1 and finally it was exported in to statistical package for social science version 24 for cleaning and analysis. Descriptive statistics were used to estimate frequency percent and mean. Dependent variables (occupational stress) were computed based on the respondents having average score of mean and above in expanded nursing stress scale. Then, associations between independent and dependent variables were analyzed first using bivariate binary logistic regression. Variables that had p<0.25 on bivariate binary logistic regression were entered into multivariable binary logistic regression and adjusted odds ratio (AOR) with 95% CI were reported. The study finding showed that 202 (53%) with (95% CI: 48.2-58.1) of nurses were occupationally stressful. Factors significantly associated with occupational stress among nurses were sex of respondents (female: AOR=2.37, 95% CI: 1.41, 3.97), marital status (ever married: AOR=2.49, 95% CI: 1.35, 4.60), Role ambiguity (nurses who had Role ambiguity: AOR=3.01, 95% CI: 1.79, 5.05) and working hours. (≥8hrs hours per day: AOR=2.85, 95% CI: 1.10, 7.36). In this study, more than half of nurses had occupational stress, Thus, Arsi zone public hospitals collaborative with concerned stakeholders to design stress reduction program for tackling occupational stress among nurses.