Management of Anger and Enhancement of General Well-Being in Nursing Students through Positive Therapy

Nursing is one among the Health Education Programmes. All of the social and economic forces, the scientific and the technology advances have influenced and continue to influence nursing as they have all spheres of human activity. The changing emphasis in medical practice and health care by others to self-care; increased use of complicated apparatus and many new drugs; the introduction of workers with such varied preparation and skills into the nursing scene; the diversity and the number of types of nursing educational programmes; the movement from apprenticeship type programmes in hospitals to educational institutions-all of these point up the urgent need for strong leadership in nursing (Heidgerken, 2000). In addition to contending with Nursing Students exams, grades, long hours of studying, work, family and other personal commitments, students also are faced with the challenges of clinical practice. Clinical Practice has been identified as one of the most anxiety producing components in nursing programmes. Lack of experience, fear of making mistakes, difficult patients, discomfort at being evaluated by faculty members, worrying about giving patients the wrong information or medication and concern about possibly harming a patient are just a few of the stressors for the beginning student nurse (Sharif & Masoumi, 2005). In this research 400 B.Sc. Nursing Students from Fr. Muller's Nursing College and Dr. M. V. Shetty College of Nursing, Mangalore, Karnataka were selected by Purposive Sampling. They were assessed using Case study Schedule (Hemalatha & Hithakshi, 2008), State Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) (Speilberger, 1988) and WHO General Well-being Index (1998). The entire sample was divided into 13 batches of 30 to 32 subjects in each batch. Psychological Intervention called Positive Therapy (Hemalatha, 2004) was given to the subjects for 9 sessions, each session lasting for about one hour, over a period of 3 weeks on alternate days. After 3 weeks the entire subjects were reassessed using Case Study Reassessment Schedule, State Trait Anger Expression Inventory and WHO General Well-being Index. Follow-up was done after 6 months. After Positive Therapy, Anger was reduced significantly and General Well-being was enhanced. There was statistically significant difference in anger and general well-being before, after and follow-up. Thus Positive Therapy was effective in the management of Anger and Enhancement of General Well-being.