A Comparative Study of the Patients’ and Staff Nurses’ Perception of Environmental Stressors in ICU at a Tertiary Care Hospital in Punjab, India

In Intensive Care Unit, there are several environmental conditions that can trigger stress responses. It includes medical devices applied to the patient, such as nasogastric tubes, Oropharyngeal airway, use of ventilators as well as the pain and discomfort. Some nurses could not perceive their patients stressors accurately, therefore effective care might not be guaranteed. Hence, it is important for the nurse to know what seems most stressful from the perspective of patient rather than their own perspective. So a comparative study of the patients’ and staff nurses’ perception of environmental stressors in ICU at DMC & Hospital, Ludhiana was done on a total of 60 subjects (30 staff nurses & 30 patients). Data was collected in month of February, 2012. A structured questionnaire was used to collect socio demographic data and clinical profile of study subjects and Modified Environmental Stressor Questionnaire was used to find out the perception of patients and staff nurses regarding environmental stressors in the ICU. Findings of the study revealed that maximum of the patients (83.3%) and staff nurses (70%) perceived ICU environment as moderately stressful. Both staff nurses and patients equally perceived ICU environment to be stressful in terms of severity of stressors but there is difference among perception of patients and staff nurses in terms of nature of stressors as staff nurses perceived ‘financial worries’ and ‘fear of death’ to be the top most stressor for patients. On the contrary patients ranked ‘being in pain’ at the top and they did not even rank ‘financial worries’ in top 5 stressors. Similarly staff nurses ranked ‘feeling of loneliness’ and ‘missing your spouse/loved one’ in the top 5 stressors but patients were more concerned with the physical stressors. Efforts should be taken to minimize stress level of patients in ICU as well as enabling staff nurses to understand patients’ perspective in a more clear way.