Psychosocial Resources in Health Care Systems

Jobs and organizations are changing more and more rapidly. These changes go along with increasing demands, job insecurity, and feelings of stress and overload. Although all economic sectors are confronted with such drastic changes and negative consequences, this book shows that there are of a special nature in the human service industry. However, at the same time, many changes also pose challenges and produce resources that may cause learning, growth, and development.

In addition to the more traditional view that focuses on the negative effects of organizational change, this book also emphasizes the potential positive aspects. Since 1985 the European Network of Organizational Psychologists (ENOP) has initiated a series of conferences in the field of health care. The IX conference took place in October 2005 in Dresden.

Traditionally, job stress factors and mental health have been the main topics in earlier conferences but since the turn of the century a positive approach emerged that focused on resources instead of demands and on well-being instead of stress. Therefore, the Dresden conference focused on "Psychological Resources in Human Service Work". This volume includes 15 contributions from authors of 9 countries from Europe and Canada.

The contributions are structured in three sections. The first section includes chapters about work conditions and organizational changes in human service work, especially in nurses and teachers. The second section deals with organizational and emotional stress factors, and well-being. The final section includes chapters about knowledge work in health care and competence training.


Leseprobe:

Towards Strategic Stress Management in the Workplace: Stress in Medical Doctors’ Professions ( P. 97)

Anna B. Leonova

The increasing complexity of modern working life requires that there is a corresponding change in psychological practices in the health promotion area. Besides the post hoc treatment of job related disorders, there has recently been an intense effort to develop preventative strategies and paradigms (Karasek &, Theorell, 1990, Leonova et al., 2001, Quick et al., 1998). Helping a worker to be more resistant to work demands, improving the personal resources available to cope with difficulties and reducing potential risk factors in the work environment are the main features of this development.

The dominant question within this productive approach to the problem of stress management is "How can we support workers’ long-term health and efficiency?" The first practical step in the realization of this approach is the development of stress management tools, which can be practically implemented in the workplace. The second step is to diagnose the individual manifestations of stress in order to develop preventive/corrective solutions.

This paper describes a new tool developed in the Laboratory of Work Psychology at Moscow State University. The theoretical basis of the instrument, data from two validation studies (with a German and a Russian samples) and an example of one of the first investigations conducted with two groups of medical doctors, working in different organizational structures, are presented.

A conceptual framework for integrative stress management research

To a large extent, the construction of diagnostic and preventive measures for stress management programs depend on the conceptual viewpoint of the authors, what the nature of the stress phenomena is, and how these phenomena can be operationally defined. In contemporary theories, one finds wide variation in the definition of stress and in the approach to its evaluation.

Besides the classical dilemma, which consists of defining stress as either (1) a set of extraordinary factors that lead to difficulty in executing behavioural tasks or (2) the individuals’ state evoked by a difficult situation (Cox &, Mackey, 1981, Hockey, 2003), several new positions have been proposed during the two last decades.

These developments in the approach to stress mainly concern the analysis of the intermediate factors, which contribute to the development of stress reactions and their consequences for workers’ well-being and mental health (e.g., Karasek &, Theorell, 1990, Parkes, 1994, Siegrist &, Peter, 1994, Warr, 1994). As a result, at least 10 substantiated theories are currently in use in the field of occupational and organizational stress research (for a review, see Cooper, 2000).

At first sight, the diversity of definitions and paradigms seems to infer ambiguity and vagueness in the basic concept of stress. From this point of view, "stress" is merely a common label for a heterogeneous mosaic of empirical problems and facts. However, a closer inspection reveals that the various models of stress seem to be relatively well integrated.

There is a consistent logic among the models, although they often concentrate on different domains or use different levels of analysis of stress-related events: risky environments or stress agents, modes of coping with stress, short- and long-term patterns of stress responses, accumulation of negative stress outcomes, etc. (Cooper, 2000, Warr, 1994).