The Prevalence of Job Stress among Nurses in Iran: A Meta-Analysis Study

Background: Many nurses experience job stress in their workplace. Given the wide range of differences in the statistics about job stress among nurses, the question that arises is what is the general prevalence of job stress among Iranian nurses? Objective: The present study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of job stress among Iranian nurses through meta-analysis. Persian and English databases including SID, MagIran, IranMedex, Google Scholar, Sciencedirect, and PubMed were searched by using the keywords such as job stress, occupational stress, work-related stress, job related stress and their combinations and 30 articles were finally selected. All the observational research articles that had information regarding the prevalence of job-related stress, sample size, and job stress instruments were entered into the meta-analysis. The form used to extract information included variables such as the first author's name, publication year, the place where the study had been carried out, type of the study, sample size, data collection instruments, and the most important findings. Results: The general prevalence of job stress was estimated to be 69% (confidence interval [CI] 95%: 0.58-0.79) based on the report of 30 papers with sample size of 4630. By region, type of hospital and the type of study, the highest prevalence of nurses' job stress was 90% (CI 95%: 0.85-0.96) in region one (Provinces of Alborz, Tehran, Qazvin, Mazandaran, Semnan, Golestan, and Qom), 70% (CI 95%: 0.60-0.80) in public and private hospitals, and 79% (CI 95%: 0.58-1.01) in studies where the type of study had not been mentioned. Conclusion: Given the high prevalence of job stress among nurses, developing programs to reduce nurses' job-related stress seems to be essential.