This case study explores attitudes and experiences of healthcare workers towards a significant change in workplace facilities and investigates factors that enabled or hindered successful change. We draw on Kotter’s eight step model, as well as presenting empirical evidence, to show that when managed appropriately, significant change in the ways of working for healthcare staff can be successful.
This study will provide a description of the nature and distribution of incivility experiences and aggressive/hostile incidents experienced by nurses during the course of a work week. Quantitative and qualitative data from close-in-time incident reports and end-of-day daily experience surveys are used to characterize the frequency, characteristics and sources of incivility and aggression as well as the nature of incidents that comprise the experiences reported during the study period.
This qualitative study investigates the relationships between occupational stress and smoking as a coping mechanism among residential addiction treatment providers, many of whom are in recovery from addiction themselves. Participants described intense and stressful work environments which compromised work-home boundaries, and this contributed to high staff turnover. Participants also describe smoking as a reprieve from the stressful work environment. Some participants reported that providing vacation days as an incentive to quit smoking may improve staff health and reduce turnover, and this intervention should be further explored in other addiction treatment settings.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a multi-union, joint labor-management team of mental health staff prioritized burnout at their public-sector worksite. A comprehensive set of interventions to address root causes was in its implementation phase when the global pandemic both interrupted those plans and exacerbated burnout for all healthcare workers. This team is now exploring what changes to their original interventions might be needed to address the massive post-pandemic burnout which they and co-workers are experiencing. They plan to lead a series of focus groups at their facility, to better understand how their colleagues experienced the last year, and what efforts would be meaningful and feasible now.
The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted countless challenges and novel stressors on healthcare workers. Emergency medicine residents have been on the frontlines of this crisis from the very start and have encountered a variety of unique stressors and challenges throughout this global crisis. Research presented here seeks to provide insight into emergency medicine residents? experiences through a mixed-methods longitudinal survey administered beginning in March 2020 and continuing to present day. Results provide a continuous and detailed storyline of challenges and coping mechanisms that emergency medicine residents have reported throughout this global crisis.
In this study conducted in a mixed population of non-clinical and clinical healthcare staff, we examined the association of depression with preventable work environment factors using a novel mediation analysis approach. We found that emotional labor (SaEL), emotional exhaustion, job strain, and work family interference were positively associated with depression while perceived organizational support for safety and work role functioning were negatively associated. The association between emotional labor and depression was strongly mediated through emotional exhaustion. These findings suggest that interventions regarding SaEL are needed for HCWs in order to reduce emotional exhaustion and consequently decrease the risk of depression. Further longitudinal studies are needed to verify these associations.
In this study conducted in a mixed population of non-clinical and clinical healthcare staff, we examined the association of emotional exhaustion-a dimension of burnout-with understudied work environment exposures including organizational-level policies and practices as well as job-level hazardous work conditions, using a novel mediation analysis approach proposed by Valerie and VanderWeele. We found that job safety, emotional labor, psychological demands, physical demands, job strain, assault and negative acts (bullying) were positively associated with emotional exhaustion while organizational support for safety was negatively associated. Job hazards served as both mediator and moderator in the association between organizational support for safety and emotional exhaustion. These findings suggest that policies for organizational commitment to employee safety should be efficiently applied to ensure reduction of job hazards in order to improve burnout. Future longitudinal studies are needed to further examine this association.
Social and environmental work and non-work experiences increase the risk for sleep deficiency (i.e., sleep duration, quality) among healthcare workers self-identifying as Black. As the COVID-19 pandemic increased the workload, stress, and disrupted sleep of healthcare workers, little was published on the sleep of registered nurses self-identifying as Black. This cross-section study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and after the protests of George Floyd?s murder, found registered nurses self-identified as Black reported experiencing sleep deficiencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sleep and health of registered nurses identifying as Black should be considered more contextually, as these nurses may need more holistic support to achieve healthy sleep.
Due to an ongoing nursing shortage within the United States, there are numerous healthcare facilities that understaffed, in which understaffed work environments have numerous consequences for both nurses and patients. The purpose of this study is to examine burnout as a linking mechanism between perceptions of understaffing and both occupational and organizational turnover intentions among nurses. Further, forms of support (organizational support and coworker support) are examined as potential buffers for the relationship between understaffing and burnout. The study sample consists of 365 full-time nurses, simple mediation analyses will be conducted to determine if burnout is the linking mechanism between understaffing and both forms of turnover intentions, and moderated mediation analyses will be conducted to determine if organizational and/or coworker support buffer the relationship between understaffing and burnout.
This study examined COVID-19 and personal factors associated with the health and well-being of 314 US nurses in hospital setting, during a heightened wave of the pandemic. A significant percentage of nurses reported high level of stressors associated with COVID-19 experience at work and in their personal lives, significant COVID-19 related anxiety, depression, and high levels of burnout. Nurses with children at home, caring for COVID-19 patients, with higher workload and less seniority, reported worse mental health and well-being outcomes. The results indicate the need for interventions to support nurses during and post-pandemic.