Technostress in Nuclear Medicine: A Qualitative Study of Causes, Mitigators, and Resolution Levels

Background – In contemporary healthcare, information and communication technology enables specialized treatment and efficient information sharing. However, it also causes stress and frustration, so-called technostress, among healthcare staff.
Purpose – To investigate the day-to-day occurrence of technostress, we ask the research question: What causes the stressful situations with technology, how are they mitigated, and to what extent are they resolved?
Method – We interviewed 15 healthcare providers in the department of nuclear medicine at a Danish hospital about their experiences with technology-induced stress in their daily work.
Results – The interviewees described 185 stressful situations with technology, mostly technology indispensable to their work. The two most frequent causes of stressful situations are system performance (46%) and technology-related organizational procedures (18%). To mitigate the situations, the most frequent strategies are accommodating (51%), consulting others for help (18%), and repeating previous task steps (13%). The mitigation strategies indicate that the stressful situations involve adapting work practices to the technology to a much larger extent than succeeding in adapting the technology to the work. Regarding the level of resolution, as much as 66% of the stressful situations are merely solved for now, that is, the concrete situation is resolved but the underlying issue remains unsolved. The underlying issue is resolved in only 10% of the situations, thereby indicating that the vast majority of the stressful situations are likely to recur later.
Conclusion – The staff at the studied hospital department repeatedly experience stressful situations with the technology they rely on in their work. This technostress is an extra stressor on top of those induced by the staff’s responsibility for providing quality patient treatment. At the individual level, technostress leads to frustration and possibly burnout; at the organizational level, it calls for preventive action.