So what can we do to support nurses?
Make sure they have a good nurse manager, enough staff, and enough resources.
Nurses will have better health and stay in their current jobs.
It’s no surprise that nurses’ health is influenced by their work environment. In our study of over 4,400 Licensed Practical Nurses in Alberta, Canada, we found that nurses had lower overall health than that of the general population. A profession that supports the health of others is doing so at the expense of their own health.
We checked to see if personal resilience made a difference for nurses’ health. It did, but working conditions matters more. The main message was that your personal coping skills are not enough if you work in a toxic environment.
There were some interesting differences among different groups of nurses. For example, nurses who worked casual were significantly better physical and mental health (about 20% higher than nurses who worked full time). This is likely happening for a few reasons: nurses who work casual tend to have more flexibility in their scheduling. This flexibility may help with childcare arrangements and other factors that make things easier. These nurses also may work less, which means they are exposed to fewer occupational hazards.
There were also variations based on work setting. Nurses who worked in hospitals had lower physical and mental health scores than nurses who worked in other settings. There may be factors in the hospital environment that mean the work has a bigger impact than community or long-term care settings.
What helped nurses was to have enough staff and enough resources to do their jobs. These are all factors we can control. We need to create good working conditions for nurses so that their health is not harmed by their workplaces.
Note: These data were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is likely that we would see similar trends now, or perhaps worse.
We asked around 600 nurses whether they were planning on staying in their jobs, and why. They told us that their work environments were mixed, with acute care settings having the lowest scores in the quality of the work environment. This means that nurses in acute care reported their workplace as being lower quality than nurses’ reports of community and outpatient settings.
The factors that made the biggest difference for nurses were the quality of their managers and whether they had enough resources at work. Having a good nurse manager and enough resources meant that nurses were more likely to stay in their current roles.
Manager education and skill building is one clear intervention from this study. Supporting nurse managers through continuing education courses and networking can mean that clinical nurses are more likely to stay in their jobs. Policy makers also need to make sure nurses have enough resources to do their jobs.
