As a health professional, you will experience role strain as you attempt to fulfill all of the roles of your position. It is normal that you will experience a disturbance of your “role set” due to multiple role obligations, so there is no need to become anxious about it as everyone will face role strain. This strain will manifest in the areas such as on the job physical and mental fatigue, time management issues at work, and coworker strife. There will be days that you will be mentally exhausted due to difficult patients, and you still have to submit a report to your supervisor and complete all of your charts before your shift is over. In addition, you have to complete an online training course on patient safety by the end of the day, so this will probably require working at home. Don’t worry, not all days will be like this one!

The Lengacher Role Strain Inventory (LRSI) is a tool that assesses the characteristic of role strain and role conflict in female nursing students. It is a 100-item Likert-type scale that is particularly related to women who are returning to school, who are employed, and who have a family. These nursing students will most likely experience greater role strain and role conflict than their unmarried peers. The most common areas of role stress are homemaker, support of husband or significant other, school, time pressures, economic pressures, personal health, children, career, community activities, and recreational activities. You have heard it said a hundred times in many different ways that self-care is imperative. Leslie K. Lobell says it best; “You cannot keep giving to others if you do not give to yourself, first. It is like pouring water from a vessel: you cannot pour and pour without ever refilling it – eventually it will run dry.”