Relationships between Female Nurses' Mental Health and Their Work Hours:An Examination of Nursing Management for Supporting Career Continuation

It has been pointed out that nurses' mental health is greatly affected by medical services they must provide without mistakes and their long work hours. In order to investigate the relationships between their mental health and work hours, a questionnaire survey was conducted on nurses who work at general hospitals. The obtained data were analyzed by using the correlation coefficient, oneway ANOVA, and Multiple comparison. The average age of the respondents was 34.8±10.3 years and their marriage rate was 54.1％. The number of those who worked less than 8 hours, between 8 and 9 hours and over 10 hours a day was as follows respectively: 252, 279, and 256. The results showed that the length of work hours and the level of depression were positively correlated with significance. In terms of the relationships between the marital status and the level of depression, the depression level was significantly lower for the married than for the unmarried. Moreover, although there was no significant relationship between the length of work hours and the depression level among the unmarried, there was a positive correlation with significance among the married. In terms of the stratified analysis of the age difference, there was a positive correlation between the length of work hours and the depression level among the married who are in their 40's and 50's while there was no significant difference among the unmarried. The result may be due to the differences in their available time caused by the differences in social roles.