Investigating the frequency of nursing stressors: a comparison across wards.

Intensive care unit stress has become an area of expanding enquiry. However the research evidence suggests that certain kinds of stressors are commonly encountered by all nurses irrespective of their nursing specialty. The frequency with which a range of stressors occurred in different wards was examined by using a nation-wide sample of 2500 New Zealand nurses. The results indicated that while intensive care-critical care wards were on average more likely to experience "difficulties involved in nursing the critically ill" than other wards, medical, continuing care and orthopaedic wards experienced in comparison more stressors more frequently. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for intervention and training.