Stress-Management for Undergraduate Nursing Students to Increase Success Rates

Abstract

Stress and anxiety among nursing students can interfere with learning and academic performance. Anxiety is predominantly caused by school and personal life imbalance, financial difficulty, as well as exams and issues in the clinical setting. Undergraduate nursing programs are implementing ways to decrease stress in the student. The project focused on minimizing stress and anxiety in the undergraduate nursing student by implementing a stress-management program so that students have better academic success compared to students who have not received the techniques in semesters one through four. The project included 97 students with reported stress and low exam scores before the implementation of the stress-management program. The Perceived Stress Scale survey was completed by the nursing students before the implementation of the program at a private university in Kansas. Findings indicated that stress management techniques have a positive effect on overall exam scores. The development and implementation of a stress-management program resulted in higher exam scores and decreased stress and anxiety in the nursing program.