The Elements Of Healthy Nursing Work Environment

ObjectivesThe main purpose of this study is to describe the elements of nursing work environment.The findings of this study will provide a theoretical basis for nursing managers to develop an evaluation index of Chinese nursing work environment.MethodsWe searched PUBMED, EBSCO, Medline, Joanna Briggs Institute Library, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CNKI, CBM, CECDB for the relevant literature. At the same time, reference retrieval and manual searching were conducted comprehensively to acquire Chinese and English literatures of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), literature reviews, systematic reviews and descriptive researches about nursing work environment around the world. Based on the preset inclusion and exclusion criteria, documents screening, quality assessment of methodology, data extraction were conducted by two researchers separately. Descriptive analysis is adopted to analyze the data.ResultsThis study included18articles (12English articles and6Chinese articles). Among these18articles,12were rated as high quality and six as low quality on Jadad scale, the qualify of research was better on the whole. The results of qualitative analysis suggested that nursing work environment was influenced by many factors. Seven elements of nursing work environment (the demand of autonomy, system support, professional development, respect and recognition, organization and management, communication and coordination and leadership) were concluded. To some extent, the common factor in the composition of nursing work environment were found between China and other countries. We can form the framework of healthy nursing work environment.ConclusionsIn order to build a healthy nursing work environment, we can provide interventions based on the assessment of aforementioned seven aspects of nursing work environment. The common factor were found between the elements of nursing work environment in Chinese context and that of other countries. The framework of healthy nursing work environment will provide a theoretical basis for further researches.