workload status and its relationship with job stress in nurses during the covid-19 pandemic

Background and purpose: currently, the high prevalence of covid-19 and increased workload in hospitals has posed a threat to the physical, mental, and emotional health of nurses. the present study was an attempt to investigate the workload and its relationship with job stress of nurses in covid-19 reference hospitals in southern iran. materials and methods: this descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional study was conducted in 2021 on 431 nurses from covid-19 reference hospitals in southern iran. data collection tools included the nasa workload and osipow job stress standard questionnaires. data were analyzed using t-test, anova, and pearson correlation coefficient in spss23 software and at a significance level of 0.05 results: the mean age and work experience of the nurses participating in the study were 31.03±5.23 and 6.42±4.61, respectively. the mean scores of the workload and job stresses were 83.64 ± 17.24 (of 100) and 236.68 ± 16.54 (of 300), respectively. mental load dimension (85.81 ±19.31, of 100) among workload dimensions and role workload dimension (43.62 ± 19.14, of 50) among job stress dimensions had the highest mean score. thus, there was found a statistically significant relationship between workload and job stress of nurses (p= 0.04, r= 0.19). conclusion: workload and job stress of the studied nurses were estimated at a high level. there was a significant positive correlation between these two variables, and increasing workload resulted in an increase in job stress.