Background: Registered nurses in the emergency department are exposed to a high workload, and the work environment is stressful. Frequent reports of burnout in the health care profession are a fact, and nurses are a particularly vulnerable group.

Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate registered nurses’ experiences of work-related stress in the emergency department.

Method: A literature review including 13 quantitative and qualitative studies was conducted. The databases CINAHL and Pubmed were used to find relevant research for this study’s intended purpose. The authors read all the studies multiple times to gain understanding and to find connections between the results.

Results: The findings in this study revealed three main themes: the feeling of inadequacy, not having control and, finally, the deterioration of their health. The nurses conveyed that they were not capable of performing optimal care due to a lack of recourses paired with a high workload. The feeling of endangering the patients' safety because of the nurses' stress was recurring. The nurses described multiple coping mechanisms to handle stressful situations at emergency departments, but none that really worked.

Conclusion: The nurses in the emergency department feel that work-related stress has a negative impact on their mental and physical health. Feelings such as powerlessness, guilt towards the patients and shame were common. Most nurses described that they were not satisfied with the quality of the care they provided. All nurses expressed the need for more resources to manage stress and to provide appropriate patient-safe care.