Background
Nursing is known to be a stressful profession. Nursing staff working at the bottom of the hierarchy and in public hospitals are the ones who are more stressed out. There is a paucity of data on prevalence of stress amongst nurses in the Indian setting. The individual contribution of various stressors, operational in nurse’s personal and professional life, to the overall stress levels also needs to be studied.

Method 
A hospital based cross sectional study was carried out on 87 randomly selected staff nurses working in two tertiary care teaching hospitals of Central Delhi. Data was collected using pre-tested and self-administered questionnaire. Socio-demographic profile, stressors in daily life, stressors at workstation and total stress level was also assessed. The data was fed and analysed using WHO’s EPI-INFO 2005 software.

Results
87.4% of nurses from the sample reported occupational stress. The prevalence of occupational stress amongst nurses was 87.4%. ‘Time Pressure’ was found to be the most stressful whereas ‘Discrimination’ was the least stressful of the given possible sources of stress in everyday life. Other highly stressful sources were: handling various issues of life simultaneously with occupation such as caring for own children/parents, own work situation and personal responsibilities. ‘High level of skill requirement of the job’ was the most important stressor and ‘helpfulness of supervisors/senior sisters’ was the least significant stressor directly related to nursing profession. Other significant work related stressors were: the fact that their jobs required them to learn new things and that they had to attend to, too many patients at the same time.

Conclusion
High prevalence of stress was found amongst nurses, and suggests the need for stress reduction programmes targeting specific important stressors.