Nursing Interventions to Help Patients with Stress

I live near the intersection of Finch and Warden, which belongs to the L’Amoreaux area, in my geographic area, one of the most common mental health issues I have seen is stress. One of the community resources I have found is “The Scarborough hospital- Birchmount site”. In the hospital, they offer the adult outpatient program for those individuals and group programming who lives in a major mental illness which contains stress (The Scarborough Hospital, 2017). The program is managed by a team of mental health care specialist (The Scarborough Hospital, 2017). Besides this program, they also offer a free application called “mental health App library”, which is the app that has been approved by 18 physicians and therapist (The Scarborough Hospital, 2017). This app could be found on both Android and apple system. In this app, people can get support for their stress. However, it’s not a replacement for professional treatment. This community resource helps people who have stress by providing professional support and knowledge, which is more convenience. In addition, to those who are not willing to ask for help about their stress in a person, they can access to the App and ask for help, which provides more opportunity to people who have stressed to speak out their questions and concerns.

The other community resource is an adult Yoga course provided by L'Amoreaux Community Recreation Centre (L'Amoreaux Community Recreation Centre). Everyone lives within the community area can apply for this free course, the course is available every Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. This resource can help people to release stress because Yoga is an activity that can promote flexible, specific breathing, and relaxing. Which is a good way to release stress as well (Yoga: Fight stress and find serenity, 2018). In addition, it’s a free course, so for those who have stress and can’t afford the price of courses. It’s a nice resource. According to the article, one of the distinguishing features of western culture is its increasing emphasis on individualism (Laungani, 2006). Since individualism makes people become more independent and self- reliant, it makes people who are western cultural become less willing to share their feeling and problems to someone else. Therefore, it makes those who have developed stress are less desired to ask for help. Besides that, individualism has a strong bearing on the notion of identity (Laungani, 2006). In addition, the feature of individualism makes sure that each individual only care about their own problems, which lead to fewer people are willing to listen to other’s problems and sharing (Laungani, 2006). It causes people can’t share their stresses with their friends or family members, which will lead to a mild stress to become a severe stress.

One of the nursing intervention I will implement for the patient with stress is taught them the relaxation exercise such as performing inspirations such as become deeper, slower and more rhythmic breath. According to the journal article, one of the important to identify a person’s stress level is stress reactivity index (SRI), in this research, researchers measured patient's SRI level pre and post nursing intervention as letting patient ding inspiration exercises (Edwards & Burnard, 2003). As a result of research, the patient who performed inspiration exercise had a significant decrease on the SRI level, which means that patient will decrease their stress level after they performed this exercise. The other nursing intervention I will implement to the patient with stress is that I will guide patient who has stress to do meditation and use music therapy. According to the research, the patient who did meditation and music therapy guided by the nurse has a significant decrease on blood pressure, decrease on cardiac rate and respiration rate (Edwards & Burnard, 2003). Since when people are in a stressful situation, the body would release a sugar hormone, which will increase blood pressure, therefore, like meditation and use music therapy can decrease blood pressure which will reduce of stress level as well.