Shiraz E-Med J. 2019 July; 20(7):e84762. Published online 2019 June 15. doi: 10.5812/semj.84762. Systematic Review Health-Related Quality of Life Measured by SF-36 in Iranian Nurses: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Fazel Dehvan 1 , Sahar Dalvand 2 and Reza Ghanei Gheshlagh 3, 4, * 1 Department of Nursing, Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Sanandaj, Iran 2 Health Management and Economics Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3 Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Sanandaj, Iran 4 Clinical Care Research Center, Research Institute for Health Development, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Sanandaj, Iran * Corresponding author: Assistant Professor, Department of Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, Sanandaj, Iran. Email: rezaghanei30@yahoo.com Received 2018 September 29; Revised 2018 December 11; Accepted 2018 December 28. Abstract Background: Nurses are the largest group in the health care system. They should have a good quality of life to be able to provide patients with high-quality care. The aim of the present study was to investigate the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among Iranian nurses. Methods: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, a systematic search was conducted in 2018 for Persian and English articles on the nurses’ quality of life published in the Scientific Information Database (SID), MagIran, Google Scholar, ISI/Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus. The Cochrane Q test and I 2 test statistic were used to test heterogeneity between studies. Because of hetero- geneity, the data were analyzed using the random and fixed-effects models. All analyses were performed using stata, version 14. Results: Overall, 13 articles with a total sample size of 4274 patients were included in the analysis. The mean HRQoL score of Iranian nurses was 60.52 (95% CI: 57.10 - 63.93). The mean score of the physical dimension of HRQoL (63.34 with 95% CI: 57.98 - 68.71) was higher than the score of psychological dimension (60.72 with 95% CI: 57.80 - 63.64) in Iranian nurses. The results of the meta-regression analysis showed no significant association between the total HRQoL score and the nurses’ age (P = 0.973) and the sample size (P = 0.12). Conclusions: The HRQoL of Iranian nurses is not very good. It seems necessary to develop strategies aimed at improving the HRQOL of Iranian patients, especially their physical domain. Keywords: Nurse, Quality of Life, Meta-Analysis, Iran 1. Background Nurses include the largest healthcare workforce who provide healthcare for patients with various needs, using their knowledge, skills, and experiences (1). Given the na- ture of the nursing profession, nurses are always faced with different stressors, including death, illness, and work- ing under high pressure. These stressors can gradually re- duce their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) by decreas- ing their physical and mental strength and impairing their daily functioning (2, 3). On the other hand, occupational hazards always threaten nurses more than other members of the treatment team; for instance, they are encountered with needlestick injuries averagely four times a year, which can lead to the transmission of infectious diseases such as hepatitis B and C, AIDS, syphilis, and brucellosis (4). Job stress is also an unavoidable part of the nursing profes- sion and nurses are faced with high levels of job stress due to such factors as high workload, role conflict, anxiety, in- adequate equipment, dealing with patients in bad health conditions, lack of job promotion, inappropriate relation- ships, and irregular work schedule and work shifts (5-7). Because of close contact with patients and their compan- ions, nurses are also faced with workplace violence more than the other healthcare providers are. A previous study showed that nurses who considered their health as bad had a lower HRQoL (8). The quality of life is a broader concept than health and encompasses different physical, psychological, cultural, and social as- pects of health and HRQoL improvement is one of the most important goals of healthcare systems (9, 10). HRQoL is a subjective concept that refers to the one’s understand- ing of his position in life in terms of cultural aspects, value system, goals, expectations, standards, and priori- ties (11). Nurses’ HRQoL is heavily related to the health- Copyright © 2019, Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.