ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2020
Collective strategies to cope with work related stress among nurses in resource constrained settings: An ethnography of neonatal nursing in Kenya.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.
- The impact of a 5G-based smart nursing information system and associated mobile hardware on clinical nurses' work stress: a randomized controlled study in a Chinese hospital.Biomedical engineering online · 2025Trial
- "Everyone in this together": a qualitative study on mothers as partners in infection prevention in a neonatal unit in Botswana.Antimicrobial resistance and infection control · 2026Article
- Time for change in implementation research and practice.BMC medicine · 2026Article
- A framework and practical approach to identify and address ethical issues arising in interventional health systems research.International journal of nursing studies · 2026Review
- Implementing a change process to support respectful communication in newborn units in Kenya: A qualitative study.International journal of nursing studies · 2026Article
- Nothing About Us Without Us: Consolidating Experiences of Maternity Care to Advance Equity.BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology · 2025Article
- Experiences of mothers in the context of a staffing intervention in select newborn units in Kenyan public hospitals.International journal of nursing studies · 2025Article
- Applying a multi-layered, mixed methods approach to evaluate technology and workforce interventions in Kenyan neonatal units.Global health action · 2025Article
- Understanding the relational culture of healthcare workplaces: a framework to guide improvement interventions, derived from a realist evaluation of neonatal care in Kenya.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Nurses experiences with an intervention enhancing skill-mix in Kenyan neonatal units with severe workforce deficits: A qualitative study.International journal of nursing studies · 2025Article
- Emotional dimensions of nurses' daily work in newborn units in Kenya: a qualitative study.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Co-design and implementation of nursing handover improvement tool in Kenyan newborn units: a pilot study.BMC nursing · 2025Article
- "Though there are some challenges, we try our best to follow the guidelines": a qualitative study exploring determinants of providing guideline-adherent care to hospitalized children in Kenya.Implementation science communications · 2025Article
- Delivery of care in high mortality hospital settings: a direct observational study examining 1848 h of neonatal nursing in Kenya.EClinicalMedicine · 2025Article
- Examining liminality in professional practice, relational identities, and career prospects in resource-constrained health systems: Findings from an empirical study of medical and nurse interns in Kenya.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2024Article
- Adapting and testing measures of organizational context in primary care clinics in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.BMC health services research · 2024Article
- Missed nursing care and its associated factors in public hospitals of Bahir Dar City, Northwest Ethiopia: a cross-sectional study.BMJ open · 2024Article
- Exploring the complex realities of nursing work in Kenya and how this shapes role enactment and practice-A qualitative study.Nursing open · 2023Article
- Mothers' involvement in providing care for their hospitalised sick newborns in Kenya: a focused ethnographic account.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2023Article
- Work from home: A behavioral model of Indonesian education workers' productivity during Covid-19.Heliyon · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Kenyan neonatal nurses are asked to do the impossible: to bridge the gap between international standards of nursing and the circumstances they face each day. They work long hours with little supervision in ill-designed wards, staffed by far too few nurses given the pressing need. Despite these conditions, a single neonatal nurse can be tasked with looking after forty sick babies for whom very close care is a necessity. Our 18-month ethnography explores this uniquely stressful environment in order to understand how nurses operate under such pressures and what techniques they use to organise work and cope. Beginning in January 2015, we conducted 250 h of non-participant observation and 32 semi-structured interviews in three newborn units in Nairobi to describe how nurses categorise babies, balance work across shifts, use routinised care, and demonstrate pragmatism and flexibility in their dealings with each other in order to reduce stress. In so doing, we present an empirically based model of the ways in which nurses cope in a lower-middle income setting and develop early work in nursing studies that highlighted collective strategies for reducing anxiety. This allows us to address the gap left by prevalent theories of nursing stress that have focused on the personal characteristics of individual nurses. Finally, we extend outwards from our ethnographic findings to consider how a deeper understanding of these collective strategies to reduce stress might inform policy, and why, even when the forces that create stress are alleviated, the underlying model of nursing work may prevail.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.