Background: Understand work related stress that nurses in specialized palliative care services in Albania experience and what are some of the aspects that impact stress due to providing care for terminally ill patients.
Methodology: In order to get some insights on the experience of work related stress of palliative care nurses in Albania, we conducted 15 individual semi-structured interviews with palliative care nurses. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed in verbatim and then analyzed using the thematic analysis framework approach.
Results: 4 main themes generated from the interviews that were related to work stress of nurses in palliative care were: good team work, peer support and leadership, nurses who worked as a team, supported each- other professionally and personally compared to nurses who mainly worked alone and had less team work tasks. Also, nurses who felt that they were respected and taking good care of from the group leaders or service managers and that their emotional needs were met by them, said that they didn’t felt stressed. Creating a good relationship with the patient and their family members was considered very important to provide good home based palliative care. Patient and family compliance to treatment plan especially in home based palliative care context is an important factor on work satisfaction and performance from the nurses. Another, theme that came up from the interview was related to work expertise, nurses who had more work expertise were less likely to be stressed than the young ones.
Discussion: Despite the fact that the majority of the nurses felt that they didn’t experience high levels of or chronic stress due to their work, few of them mentioned some barriers that could affect indirectly to work related stress such as high work load, lack of transportation means and medical equipment, and lack of professional barriers.
Conclusions: Occupational and mental health care should be provided to nurses and other health professionals working in palliative care in order to enhance their awareness on work related stress and use of preventive strategies.