Abstract
Aims: Nursing research identified occupational distress as a major issue in the nursing workforce, encompassing various concepts and definitions. This integrative literature review explored how nursing research has applied conceptual definitions of occupational distress to assess conceptual clarity.
Background: Research on occupational distress in nursing mainly focused on six concepts: burnout, moral distress, compassion fatigue, moral injury, post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury. These conditions harm nurses' well-being and contribute to absence, leading to staffing shortages and potentially nurses leaving their careers. Undermining nursing wellness threatens the quality of care provided to patients and undermines the entire health system.
Methods: The five-stage integrative review process included problem identification, literature searches, data evaluation, analysis and presentation of findings. The author searched for appropriate literature written in English from CINAHL, Psylnfo, Scopus, ProQuest, and Web of Science databases. The search identified 433 articles. After screening and removing duplication, 68 relevant articles were included in the review, covering six different conceptual definitions of occupational distress, from 2000 to 2023.
Findings: Sixty-eight eligible articles represented key themes of occupational distress. The first finding was that the majority of articles used six different occupational distress definitions interchangeably. They also employed signs and symptoms as conceptual definition. Lastly, inconsistent applications of concepts caused challenges in identifying occupational distress accurately.
Conclusion/Implications for nursing: More conceptual consistency is needed to improve understanding of occupational distress. Clear conceptual definitions of specific types of occupational distress can aid nurses in identifying, coping with and preventing it more effectively.
Research forum abstract