Finnish Occupational Physicians’ and Nurses’ Experience of Work Related Stress Management: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Work-related stress has a strong influence on the health of workers. Occupational health care has an important role in assessing and managing this stress in collaboration with enterprises. The methods to reduce stress can be directed at the individual and at the organization as a whole. There is little information about stress handling methods in occupational health practices. This study aims to investigate these practices in Finnish occupational health physicians' and nurses' work. The data were generated through semi structured interviews of ten voluntary occupational physicians and eight occupational nurses in the metropolitan area of Finland in June 2009. The work-related stress was experienced as difficult to handle. There was no specific protocol for handling work-related stress in practice. Stress reduction activities were mostly randomly directed at the individual or the organizational level. Activities remained mainly on the individual level and were rarely allocated to the organization. There is a need for structured guidelines on how to manage work-related stress to assure standardized action on both the individual and organizational level. The roles of the physician, nurse and psychologist should be clarified in teamwork. Their collaborative activities should be directed also to the organisational level.

The experiences of general practitioner partners living with distress: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

“…Given the current difficulties with recruiting GPs in general and partners in particular (Baird et al, 2016; Fletcher et al, 2017), it is crucial that we learn more about the experiences of GP partners and GPs in general, so that they can be supported within their working environment, and general practice sustained. Based on current and previous findings, the authors recommend that, in line with the GP Forward View (National Health Service (NHS), 2016), more GPs are recruited in order to alleviate time pressures (Hobbs et al, 2016; Richter et al, 2014), that researchers develop organisational interventions in order to address practice level issues such as bullying (Kinnunen-Amoroso, 2011; Montgomery, 2014; Romani and Ashkar, 2014), and that clinical supervision and debriefs are incorporated as protected time activities within general practice (Garelick and Fagin, 2004; Huby et al, 2002) on an ongoing basis.…”

Finnish Occupational Health Nurses' View of Work-Related Stress

“…No standardized protocols to assess and manage work-related stress in Finnish occupational health services or their client companies were identified. According to Finnish surveys on occupational health services, the use of models to monitor work ability problems is not established in Finnish occupational health services (Kinnunen-Amoroso, 2011;Manninen, 2009). This finding is similar to the results of the current study.…”

Work-related Stress Management by Finnish Enterprises

“…The issue of work-related stress was previously investigated through interviews and self-completed questionnaires with occupational health 10 physicians and 8 nurses 14 ) . The questionnaire for this study was formulated based on this earlier data.…”