Frazzled?

Am currently carrying an 'Ambulatory Stress Diary'!

Looking into work stress, a research team have acquired a number of PDA's for staff to record their stress, anxiety, frustration, happiness, etc... levels through three shifts. I'm on day two of mine (Sunday). It's going to be a little skewed as weekends tend towards being far more relaxed than weekdays but I'm sure Tuesday, one of the worst days will make up for it!

The alarm sounds every 90 minutes of my twelve hour shift, asking me to record various feelings. I can also input effects of 'significant incidents' (of which I've had three so far! One of which was before arriving at work today!) and at the end of the shift, I have torecord a few extra details about the day as a whole and the worst part of the shift.

Others have also completed this and overall, the feeling is that the alarm every 90 minutes is stressfull in itself - alarms demand attention, which doesn't always sit well when you're deep into another task. I wonder how many of us have stopped doing something more important in order to answer the beeping? It's like when I hold the Medical Bleep, manageing staffing for thirteen wards, attending emergencies and offering clinical expertese advice(!) over the phone or in person! When it goes off, you feel obliged to drop everything and answer it... OK, so in the event of an emergency, you should do but in many cases, again, the work we're currently doing is more important!

On an aside, The other day I had the bleep and the emergency call came across for a Cardiac Arrest outside the X-Ray dept. This alas for me, is the other end of a very long set of corridors! It was quite a run, leaving me rather breathless and shaky on arrival - and only to find that because they were so close to the main Theatres, they'd taken the poor soul in their for the rescusitation attempt... Not needing extra folk who'd responded! *gasp* Showed me how unfit I was!! I'm not sure I could've sung Nellie the Elephant in that state! (the Nellie song being how you count the number of chest compressions...!)

So, another day looms... The stress monitor will beep at me at around 07.30hrs, just as I'm going into handover and needing to concentrate on something else...! We'll see how many 'significant incidents' I can record today! And ultimately, see just how stressed nursing staff get, and for what reasons when the study is published? Jxx