Mental Health Nursing: sources of stress and strategies for coping

Health care workers at every level, qualified and unqualified, appear to have a higher than average sickness and absence rate than workers in other sectors, and it has been identified that stress may play a leading role in nurses leaving the profession. There are further strong indicators that sickness and absence is higher amongst mental health workers. Numerous small scale studies (Mazure 1995, Moore & Burrows 1996) were undertaken in the 1990s, mainly in England, to try and identify factors that lead to stress and burnout amongst staff in the community, and comparison studies have also been conducted, comparing community based staff with ward based staff. In this paper, the literature from 1994 onwards is reviewed, with a particular focus upon Community Mental Health Nurses (CMHNs) and, where comparisons are made, ward based staff.