Quality of life of professionally active nurses

Introduction:
The aim of the study was to assess the quality of life of nurses, including the subjective sense of their own health.

Material and methods:
The study was conducted in a group of 100 randomly selected nurses employed at the Ludwik Perzyna Provincial Hospital in Kalisz. The study used a standardized tool, i.e. the SF-36 questionnaire for assessing the quality of life (Polish version: Tylka J, Piotrowicz R), supplemented with 7 custom questions. Statistical analysis was based on the following tests: Pearson’s c², Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient test and the Mann-Whitney U test. The value of p < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results:
In self-assessment of the current general state of health in the opinion of the surveyed nurses, the majority reported a “satisfactory” (33%), “good” (31%) or “very good” (24%) level. The state of mental functioning of nurses was confirmed by the occurrence of “fatigue” in the study group – the mean value was 4.09 ±1.

Conclusions:
The surveyed group of nurses most often indicated a “satisfactory” level of general sense of their health. A “very good” level of health functioning was reported by single/widowed people, without children, with a very good economic situation and people living in rural areas. The occurrence of limitations in the scope of physical functioning of the respondents and lower self-esteem of the perception of the general sense of health had a negative impact on the quality of mental and social life.