A nationwide survey of 2500 general and obstetric nurses identified five potential sources of stress. These included work overload, difficulties relating to other staff, the difficulties involved in nursing the critically ill, concerns over the treatment of patients, and dealing with difficulty or helplessly ill patients. These findings support earlier work which suggested that a number of stressful situations are commonly encountered by all nurses. In terms of intervention strategies these results point to a number of important issues which are discussed in this paper. They include the difficulties and conflicts inherent in the nurses' role, the multidimensional nature of the different stressors, aspects of the work environment which give rise to different stressors and the relationship between stressors.