Healthcare workers often face considerable levels of stress. In particular, nursing home workers often mention how stressful their jobs are and how difficult it is to deal with the daily stressors found in their work. When stress is mentioned, most individuals often refer to negative forms of stress. However, not all stress is negative. Furthermore, optimal levels of stress can actually be productive for nursing home workers and even residents. Moreover, optimal levels of stress can lead to healthy and productive interactions that invigorate the nursing home environment. The attachment below shows a diagram of how stress can be productive and unproductive. Notice the area of optimal stress and what happens when you move outside of those parameters.
In the diagram it becomes obvious that moving too far to the left or to the right of the optimal level of stress problems come to exist. If you move too far to the left boredom exits. Boredom is a stressor that can have a stultifying affect on the productivity of work as well as the general wellbeing for those living and working within such an environment. Conversely, moving too far to the right of the optimal level of stress leads to anxiety, which also impedes the satisfaction of work and life in the nursing home environment. The administrator and management staff have to be aware of this to help enhance their own productivity as well as suffuse an appropriate level of stress into the environment that will ward off these two extremes.
Excessive boredom in a long-term care environment leads to monotony. Workers do not feel challenged and the residents do not feel invigorated. An environment that has excessive levels of boredom slows an individual's cognitive ability due to the lack of appropriate stimulation. Workers often become less than productive and will often engage in careless mistakes that can become critical errors in the nursing home setting. For residents, excessive boredom can lead to regression and many older adults actually go through a period of desocialization, in which many well-learned social skills are lost.
Excessive stress that leads to anxiety is also counter-productive. Workers in anxiety provoking environments become overwhelmed. Many administrators often face this problem with the countless numbers of duties that they have to accomplish in a given day. However, when anxiety becomes excessive, is clouds one's mental abilities, it leads to reduced performance, and rather than enhancing fluidity, it locks up the person's creative ability. For residents as well excessive stimulation can produce anxiety and apprehension that impedes the quality of their lives.
One of the greatest misconceptions I often hear is people saying they would like to have a workplace free of stress. In reality stress is a natural part of life and for one to live stress must exist. However, the trick is to develop an environment that minimizes the extremes and establishes an optimal level of stress for proper stimulation. Both too little and too much stress can be unhealthy and unproductive for workers and residents alike. The consequences of extreme levels of stress are multifaceted. Excessive stressors can lead to biological issues for workers and residents, leading to unhealthy increases in cortisol levels in the body, hypertension, increased susceptibility to infections, fatigue, muscle tension and headaches just to name a few.
However, the psychological and behavioral toll also cannot be minimized. These problems included depressed and apathetic workers and residents, high worker turnover, low levels of worker satisfaction as well as low levels of satisfaction found among residents and family members, more worker sick days used, and more worker, resident and family complaints made. There are many more that can be mentioned but this helps to summarize some of the most common problems that are found. It becomes evident that unhealthy environments that fail to foster the optimal level of stress can become an endemic issue. Unfortunately, in too many nursing care facilities, this problem is all too common. The problem of failing to achieve less than optimal levels of stress among facility workers and residents to enhance performance and health is an endemic issue that is found among many of our nursing care facilities within the United States.
Therefore the question that needs to be posed is how does one achieve optimal levels of stress that can be beneficial for worker and resident health? This is obviously no easy task. Furthermore, there is no measuring tool that can be used to tell you when your facility has reached the optimal level to enhance performance and health. However, for workers, optimal stress is achieved when the stimulation that they encounter leads to an environment that overrides monotony and challenges the worker, providing a stimulating environment that does not overload the worker. For residents, the environment should also provide an optimal level of stimulation that challenges their existing abilities without providing overload or underutilization of their abilities. As one can see there is a considerable level of variability that exists since all workers and residents have different skills and abilities. Therefore, the administrator, the management and the work staff have to be aware of this and attempt to sensitize themselves toward meeting this challenge.
Once a nursing care facility can meet this challenge, it not only goes a long way toward enhancing the psychological, emotional and physical health of the residents and staff, but also the facility as well. As human beings we are vessels that hold an incredible potential that can only be achieved under the right circumstances. It therefore becomes imperative that we understand the important impact, both positive and negative, which stress has for us and for those that we serve. Creating an environment that fosters optimal levels of stress, while preventing excesses in both directions, can be a formidable task for the administrator and staff of a nursing care facility. However, once successfully achieved, it can go a long way toward enhancing the health and productivity of a nursing care facility.
Source: www.community.advanceweb.com.
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