Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

8-2022

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5987-3306

Document Type

DNP Project

Department

Nursing

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Sandra Cleveland

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Tricia Bernecker

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

Pattie Sunderhaus

Abstract

This project was developed to address the issue of high stress levels among graduate nursing students, which is a common phenomenon that increases the risks of mental health disorders, professional burnout, and poor-quality patient care among students and professional nurses after earning their degrees. This project sought to utilize a simple educational intervention delivered online to impart coping skills to graduate nursing students to assist them in reducing their stress levels. The intervention was a brief, single-session, self-guided educational module featuring informational and participative elements related to stress causes, the impacts of stress, and stress reduction techniques. In total, 11 graduate nurse practitioner students from one nursing program took part in the project. The analytical results indicated that the participants experienced significant (p < .05) improvements in their usage of healthy coping skills after taking part in the intervention compared to before. Moreover, the participants reported lower levels of stress at postintervention compared to pre-intervention. These findings suggest that nursing programs should screen for stress among graduate students and offer options for stress education and reduction to students. The findings could therefore help to improve stress outcomes and related patient care outcomes for graduate nursing students through offering ways for students to learn healthy coping techniques.

Keywords: stress, professional burnout, nursing, coping, intervention

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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