Helping Nurses Manage Their Stress by Integrating Health Promotion. Part 3
The Cayuga Community Health Network Center consists of 340 nursing employees. Of this group 275 agreed to attend the Stress Management for Professional Caregivers workshop. All of the participants were female, with the majority (90%) being Caucasian. Levels of education varied among nurses. Approximately (22%) have a LPN degree, less than half (45%) have a RN in nursing, while (18%) have a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, and a little less than one-quarter (15%) have a Master of Science in Nursing.
The administration from the Cayuga Community Health Network Center in Auburn, New York conducted a needs assessment with all of their nurses and provided employees the opportunity to participate in a workshop for professional caregivers to reduce stress.
Two hundred and seventy five of the three hundred and forty nursing employees agreed to participate in the stress management workshop which was facilitated by a faculty member in the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College. In this stress management workshop (see Table 2 for activities conducted by the Cayuga Community Health Network), nurses learned: 1) how to identify their stressors, 2) how stress can psychologically and physically impact the body, and 3) learned a variety of other relaxation techniques (e.g., diaphragmatic breathing and yoga). Most (84%) of the participating nurses stated they planned to share the workshop information with other nurses and family members. A majority (85%) said the workshop made them think about how they handled stress. Nearly all (97%) of the nurses stated that the information in the stress management workshop was valuable to them professionally. The nurses rated the workshops informative and excellent.
The success of this stress workshop for nurses was a result of the collaboration among and support of administration from the Finger Lakes Geriatric Education Center at Ithaca College, the Cayuga Community Health Network Center, and an assistant professor from the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education at Ithaca College. Implementing health promotion programs from an ecological perspective have the potential to reduce stress for nurses and reduce health care cost for the employer. The idea that administrators have a shared vision, as their nurses and are willing to allocate recourses for nurses to reduce their stress shows that a multi-level ecological model is conducive to a worksite environment.