Stress in Health Professionals : Psychological and Organisational Causes and Interventions

Author: Jenny Firth-Cozens, Roy L. Payne
List Price: $60.00
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ISBN: 0471998761
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (15 December, 1999)
Sales Rank: 1,156,054
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 4 out of 5
Strees in health professionals
This book is the second edition (first published in 1987) edited by a clinical psychologist from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England and an organisational psychologist from Curtin University of Technology, Perth in Western Australia. There are also 25 international multidisciplinary contributors with most of the authors from the field of psychology. Stress in health professionals is devided into three parts: the study of stress, the stress of various professions and interventions with a total of 18 chapters. The first edition had focus on physicians at a time, when the field was in its initial stage, but the present edition has a much broader definition of health professionals, including nurses, health service managers, ambulance personnel and child protection workers. I especially liked the chapter on child protection workers, because this is a field, where in the "heat of the moment" the focus is most of the times on the child and their families. Cases of child abuse usually gets a lot of media coverage and in recent years the media has often blamed the professionals of overreaction and being too ready to remove children from their families, especially in cases of child sexual abuse. In this chapter results from a survey of doctors and nurses working in child protection from the Yorkshire region are presented. The higest levels of stress were caused by the fear of making mistakes, followed by overwork and organisational change. Doctors found the most difficult group to relate to were fellow pediatricians followed by senior managers, while nurses found social services personnel followed by senior managers their most difficult groups to work with. The book can be recommended as a resourse for health providers, managers and researchers involved in the field of work stress.

Professor Joav Merrick, MD, DMSc Medical Director, Division for the Mentally Retarded, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Box 1260, IL-91012 Jerusalem, Israel; Email: jmerrick@aquanet.co.il



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