95% of nurses consider that they have a high or excessive volume of work and 88.3% recognize that this pressure of care affects them a lot or a lot psychologically, as shown in Study on the impact of pressure of care in the nursing profession which was presented this Monday in Madrid by the General Council of Nurses (CGE).
This is a survey which aims to find out the current situation of nurses and in which More than 8,300 professionals participated. Thus, 86% of nurses had episodes of stress, 66.6% anxiety, 60% insomnia and 27 reported having suffered from depression.
Furthermore, 56.1% of the nurses questioned say that their employment situation has deteriorated compared to the one they had before covid-19. “The current situation is terrible. If everything stays the same, we will have a bankruptcy of the Spanish health system. We can no longer alert politicians about working conditions, the situation is at its limit,” warned the president of the General Nursing Council during the press conference. Florentino Pérez Raya.
Regarding the volume of work, nurses give it a score of 8.62 out of 10, and although the perception of overwork affects all areas, the socio-health field (8.91), and hospitalization (8.81) They have the highest scores.
A drop of 23%
The document reveals that 23% of nurses requested sick leave due to a problem derived from emotional burden generated by health pressure, which represents an increase compared to 2022, where this figure was 16.5%.
“This figure represents a huge economic cost to the system and a greater burden on the rest of the nurses. If we fail to prevent our colleagues’ problems, they will continue to get worse,” stressed the vice-president of the CGE, Raquel Rodriguez.
In this sense, 63 percent of those consulted said they needed professional psychological help. Among them, 37.8% had access to this aid. Likewise, 6 in 10 professionals say they have thought about leaving the profession at some point, a higher figure than in 2022, when it was 46.5%.
“We saw that 36 percent said they would not return to nursing studies if they could go back, which is 7.7 points more than two years ago, when this reconsideration concerned 28, 4 percent,” explained the coordinator of the Spanish Institute of Nursing Research of the Spanish Institute of Nursing Research. CGE, Guadalupe Fontán.
The president of the CGE announced that the study would be presented on November 19 to the Secretary of State for Health, Javier Padilla. “In the meeting we will hold, we will inform you of the current situation, which you need to know. Previously, I said that the Ministry of Health was solving some important problems of the profession, but we heard the promises of other previous ministers and they did not come true,” lamented Pérez Raya.
