Marga Hoogendoorn

91 I NTRODUCT I ON The Intensive Care is a labor-intensive environment for nurses. The care for ICU patients is demanding due to the severity of illness of ICU patients and the often technical complexity of the treatment 1,2 . The support and care for the patient and his or her relatives, confronted with a critical and life-threatening situation, can be emotionally burdensome. Because of the relatively high mortality risk of ICU patients, ICU nurses are regularly confronted with end-of-life care which also can have a high impact on their mental workload. The physical care can be demanding because most ICU patients are completely dependent of the nursing care, but also because of specific ICU nursing care as mobilization of ventilated patients or turning patients into prone position. That this work often has to be done in limited space and in ergonomic uncomfortable positions add to this physical demand 3 . Therefore, the mental and physical demand on ICU nurses is high 4,5 . Research has shown that all those factors: intensity of nursing activities, severity of illness, complexity of care and mental demand, attribute to the nursing workload 6-11 . This becomes particularly important as it has been shown that nursing workload is related to job satisfaction, burn-out and an intention to leave the current job 12,13 . Given the shortage of ICU nurses in Netherlands but also in many other western countries 14,15 , it is important to keep nurses motivated and satisfied with their job. In an earlier study we assessed the association of time and activity based (objective) workload with the perceived nursing workload and concluded that it is important to take both the number of patients and the nursing workload into consideration when planning nursing capacity 11 . However, both the objective and the perceived workload did not give insight in the workload satisfaction of nurses. We therefore extended on our previous research with the aim to gain insight in the workload satisfaction of ICU nurses. To the best of our knowledge there are no studies published on the association of nurses’ workload satisfaction with the objective or perceived nursing workload. OBJ ECT I VE The aim of this study is to assess the association of workload satisfaction with both the objective nursing workload, measured with Nursing Activities Score, and the perceived nursing workload, measured with the NASA-TLX. We hypothesized that both a too low and too high workload could lead to dissatisfaction of the nurse. To further understand