Stress, Fatigue, and Workload in Intensive Care Nursing: A Scoping Literature Review

Stress and fatigue are being interchangeably used in the nursing literature resulting in operationalization and measurement issues. A scoping review was conducted to identify different definitions and operationalization of these constructs. Findings can be used to develop tools to measure stress and fatigue as different constructs to aid nursing administrators to gain a new perspective into nursing schedule, workload, morale and well-being of nurses. The findings show that there is a research gap in measurement of acute stress in nursing, physiological measures are currently not used for continuous assessment of stress or fatigue for nurses, and lack of stress and fatigue definitions in terms of physiological measures for assessment purposes. Continuous monitoring and physiological measures such as heart rate can be used to measure and differentiate between the constructs of stress and fatigue