Workplace stress factors

Others lose their concentration due to job or task interruption. Healthcare workers and professionals should deal with stress, lack of sleep, and fatigue on the job. Workplace environmental factors, personal or home distractions, and substance abuse can also impair performance. James Reason in his studies developed some questions to address errors committed on the job. Consider the following questions when investigating an error or other adverse event ... 

Occupational and environmental medicine is a branch of medical practice specializing in disease and illness related to work and environmental exposures. Occupational health physicians diagnose and treat diseases and illness that may arise from work and exposure to hazardous environments. Such exposure may be a contributory factor in other diseases. Treatment may include various physical and occupational therapies to allow a return to work. Occupational health physicians also promote healthy workplaces and deal with workplace stresses. The professional organization in the United State is the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM). 

In the workplace, some factors have been shown to create stress for some workers. They are the lack of control on the job, the failure to fit into the workplace social structure, excessive demands of a job, or severe time expectations. Other job characteristics that contribute to workplace stress are... 

Errors and mistakes can be reduced by the use of instruction, training and relevant information. However, communication can also be a problem, particularly at shift handover times. Environmental and organizational factors, involving workplace stress will also affect error levels. 

In the workplace some factors have been shown to create stress for some workers. They are the lack of control on the job, the failure to fit into the workplace social structure, excessive demands of a job, or severe time expectations. The lack of job security has become very real with so much reorganizing and downsizing transpiring in the business community. Career pressures including increased responsibility are viewed as stressors by many workers. Some workers have jobs which are too complex for their talents, abilities, or skills. Last, but by no means unimportant, is the physical environment such as noise, temperature extremes, lighting, space and odors. 

Job-induced repetitive stress injuries is the fastest-growing category of workplace injuries. Specific stress factors include repetitive motion, awkward posture, heavy lifting, or a combination of these factors. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) lost- time injuries and illnesses reported in 1993 included the following ... 

Industrial hygiene The science and art devoted to the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of those environmental factors or stresses arising from the workplace which cause sickness, impaired health and well-being, or significant discomfort and inefficiency among workers or among the citizens of the community. 

Before elaborating on a cognitive behavioural model of occupational stress, it would be helpful at this point to overview the literature on both the personal (individual) and environmental factors (in the workplace) which are believed to contribute to the development of occupational stress. 

M. Nonchemical physical exposures in the workplace are important because they can cause systemic effects that mimic chemical toxidromes. The most important example is heat stress, which is a major occupational health issue. Other relevant nonchemioal, work-related physical exposure types include ionizing radiation, nonionizing radiation (such as ultraviolet, infrared, and microwave exposure), and increased barometric pressure (eg, among caisson workers). Except for extremes of exposure, the adverse effects of these physical factors are generally associated with chronic conditions. 

These disorders include hypertensive disease, ischemic heart disease, other forms of heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease. As with cancer, the specific contribution of occupational factors to the causation of CVD has been debated, but there is agreement that some workplace factors contribute to or cause CVD (see Smith and Sainfort 1990 for a detailed discussion of psychosocial factors and their contribution). Four main occupational sources of CVD causation are agents that affect cardiopulmonary capacity, chemicals, noise, and psychosocial stress. 

In task analysis, it is common practice to distinguish between stress and strain. However, these terms are sometimes used interchangeably and confusedly. In this chapter, stress refers to a condition that may lead to an adverse effect on the body, whereas strain refers to the effect of stress on the body. For example, working at a computer job in dim lighting often leads to headaches. The dim lighting is considered the stress, and the headache is the strain. The term stressor is also widely used as a synonym for stress. Strain has often been wrongly called stress. These terms must be clearly defined to determine which factors are causative ones (stresses) and which are consequences (strains). Stress is determined by task demands, while strain is determined by the amount of physical resources expended beyond some tolerable level, defined by the person s resource capacities. The stress-strain principle is pivotal to task analysis when one is concerned with errors, cumulative traumas, and injuries in the workplace and is applicable to task situations where task demands are likely to exceed human resource capacities. 

It is illogical to conclude after an incident occurred that the principal causal factor was the unsafe act of a worker if the design of the workplace or the work methods is error-provocative. Systemic causal factors should be considered primary if the design of the work was error-provocative, or overly stressful, or if the immediate work situation encouraged riskier actions than the prescribed work methods. To identify the causal factors in such situations solely or emphatically as an employee error or as an unsafe act would be wrong and ineffective. 

A highly stressed workplace is the most susceptible to violence. The following factors add considerably to the problem ... 

It cannot be stressed enough that humans are a key risk factor for contamination and cross-contamination. The work discipline should aim to avoid mix-up of materials at each stage of the preparation process. The golden rule is never work on different products in the same room simultaneously or subsequently, unless any risk of confusion is excluded. An example of achieving this is the practice of performing only one preparation per workplace and that this workplace is released before starting a new preparatirMi this is also called line clearance. It is advisable to organise the work in such a way that once started, preparatirms can be completed undisturbed and uninterrupted. 

Inadequate lighting in the workplace may affect the level of stress among employees. Outline eight other factors associated with the physical environment that may increase stress at work. 

Enviroiunental factors or stresses in the workplace can cause sickness or significant discomfort among workers or citizens of the community. Proper industrial hygiene will alleviate these effects. It includes the identification of health hazards, the evaluation of their magnitude, and the development of corrective measures to control them. The goals of an industrial hygiene program are to ... 

Some hazards are caused by workplace exposure. Other hazards arise from a combination of workplace exposure and personal lifestyle. Two examples illustrate this point. Stress may arise at work (and usually does to some extent) and be quite tolerable to an individual. However, combine that with stress from the individual s personal life (such as undergoing a divorce or a bereavement) and harm to health can easily arise. The other example is musculo-skeletal injury, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, which may be experienced by a VDU operator using a keyboard all day. Combine the workplace activity with a hobby of surfing the net and it easy to see that this additional exposure increases the risk of wrist injury. In both these examples it is not easy to determine which of these activities are the causative factors and what their contributions are to the resulting harm. An activity that is not a hazard because it does not cause harm can become one under different circumstances. 

Dollard, M., Skinner, N., Tuckey, M.R. Bailey, T. (2007). National surveillance of psychosocial risk factors in the workplace An international overview. Work Stress An International Journal of Work, Health Organisations, 21(1), pp. 1-29. 

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