Collective strategies to cope with work related stress among nurses in resource constrained settings: An ethnography of neonatal nursing in Kenya.

ABSTRACT: Kenyan neonatal nurses are asked to do the impossible: to bridge the gap between international standards of nursing and the circumstances they face each day. They work long hours with little supervision in ill-designed wards, staffed by far too few nurses given the pressing need. Despite these conditions, a single neonatal nurse can be tasked with looking after forty sick babies for whom very close care is a necessity. Our 18-month ethnography explores this uniquely stressful environment in order to understand how nurses operate under such pressures and what techniques they use to organise work and cope. Beginning in January 2015, we conducted 250 h of non-participant observation and 32 semi-structured interviews in three newborn units in Nairobi to describe how nurses categorise babies, b

SUBMITTER: McKnight J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6983929 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature