The quality of healthcare services is correlated with happy healthcare professionals as well as the equipment used. However, stress is an important factor in working life, which negatively affects the productivity, happiness, job satisfaction, and consequently the private life of the staff and increases the tendency to leave. Nursing, which has the most intense working tempo of the occupational groups serving in the health sector, is the profession most affected by stress. It is possible to say that the main reasons of this are long and tiring working hours, being in a race against time, physical working conditions, working with the shift system, workload and so on. Due to these reasons, situations that create pressure and compulsion such as insomnia, poor diet, malnutrition, the conflict between colleagues, role ambiguity causes an increase in stress levels. Some disorders like cardiovascular system diseases, circulatory system disorders, reproductive system diseases, skin diseases, headache, and migraine reveal the physiological effects of the stress experienced. On the other hand, depression and anxiety like diseases also cause psychological problems. In this context, this study aims to measure the effect of perceived working life stress and stress symptoms of nurses working in a public hospital on the tendency to leave. The expectation that the tendency to leave the job will exhibit consistent correlations with the stress symptoms and that these symptoms will affect the tendency to leave the job constituted the main target of the study. According to the findings obtained from a sample of 263 nurses, it is understood that the increase in job stress increases the tendency to leave (r=0,34, p>0,001). The correlations of the data related to five main stress symptom groups named as anxiety, depression, negative self, somatization, and hostility in the relation with the tendency to leave are positive and statistically significant with the others except for negative ego sub-symptom. The highest correlation is obtained with the hostility symptom group (r = 0.21, p> 0.001), and it is also understood that as the hostility level of individuals increases, the tendency to leave their jobs also increases.
