Turnover Intention and its Relationship with Occupational Stress Among Nurses in Educational Hospitals affiliated to Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, 2015

Abstract

Abstract: Introduction: Job stress is one of the basic factors in reducing the productivity in organizations and creating physical and mental complications in personnel and nowadays is common among the health care staff. The shortage of nurses and nurse's intention to leave the profession, will directly effect on quality and quantity of the health cares and eventually, the health of individuals and community. This study was carried out with the aim of determining the intention to leave the profession and its relationship with job stress in nurses employed in educational-treatment centers of Tabriz University of medical sciences in 1394. Method: In this descriptive and cross-sectional study, 450 persons of the nurses employed in educational-treatment centers of Tabriz were studied. The method of sampling was simple sampling and the samples were selected from among the eligible persons and included in the study. The tools of research consisted of the demographic information questionnaire and expanded nursing stress scale (ENSS) questionnaire and Jabran Almaleki’s questionnaire of intention to leave the profession and also the questionnaire related to the factors of leaving the profession in nurses that was made by the researcher based on the study carried out by Abbaszadeh, et al .Data were analyzed using descriptive and analytical statistical tests in SPSS software, version13. Results: Of the 500 questionnaire distributed, only 450 questionnaire (90%) were returned. The investigation of the participant’s individual- social and occupational characteristics showed that, 344 persons (76.4%) were male. The monthly income status of 56.2% of the respondent nurses was reported somewhat sufficient. The average of intention to leave the profession was moderate to high (4.04+_0.53) and the average of nurse’s stress was reported moderate to high (2.10+_ 0.44).Among the stressors, family and patient areas, discrimination, workload and death allocated themselves the highest average of stress, respectively. In this study, a significant relationship was not seen between age, marital status, education, income, type of employment and workplace with intention to leave the profession. There was only a significant relationship between gender with job stress and intention to leave the profession so that, job stress in women was higher than in men and the rate of profession leaving among women with the score of 48.96 was higher than men with the mean score of 47. The average and standard deviation of age and nurse’s clinical work history were 31.80+_6.87 and 3.39+_ 1.49, respectively. Discussion and conclusion: The results of this study showed that, nurse’s intention to leave the profession and the rate of their job stress is moderate to high and various factors contribute to this. In this regard, helping to reduce stress in nurses can be achieved through the coherent planning in all dimensions, especially in individual and organizational dimensions and management, training solutions and preventive measures can also be provided for reducing the intention to leave the profession so that we can prevent the costs resulting from nurse’s profession leaving on health system while improving health and maintaining nurses in the health system.