A comparative analysis of stress in intensive care and general floor nursing

Anxiety is currently a central explanatory concept in most theories of personality and psychopathology. Regarded as a basic or fundamental human emotion, anxiety may be defined as the feeling of being unable to copes with stress. Stress may be defined as the perception of a problem requiring coping--making an adaptive change in one's feelings, thinking or behavior. In the hospital setting, particularly among Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses, stress is considered a fact of life. This project was designed to analyze the manifestation of stress in ICU and non-ICU settings among nurses via the use of Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory . . Comparisons among lCU and non-lCU nurses were JIBde, demographic information was investigated and the function of the various factors in the inventory itself was analysed.