APA assignment-Sample Solution

Impact of Work-Related Factors on Nurse Health and Well-being and Potential Interventions to Enhance Nurse Health and Well-being

Work-related factors can negatively impact nurse health and well-being. Ideally, nurses continue to cope with overwhelming workloads, inadequate resources and PPEs, stigma, and increasing health demands of various patient populations, especially the aging population, which adds to the stresses and demands at the workplace that jeopardize their health and well-being. Nurses experience mental, emotional, physical, and ethical challenges during nursing practice that impact their health and well-being. Depending on the setting and work environment, nurses risk infections, physical and verbal attacks, conflict, and other issues that elevate work-related stress, impacting their health and well-being. Poor nurses’ health and well-being also increase the potential of medical errors and other human errors that compromise patient care quality and safety. Since work-related factors can negatively impact nurse health and well-being, nurse leaders should take steps to improve the working environment, encourage nurses to adopt self-care strategies, and provide education sessions to enhance the well-being of their team members.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Background

Nurse health and well-being, or lack thereof, significantly impacts nurses, patients, healthcare institutions, and society because nurses struggle to care for others if they cannot care for themselves. Nurse health and well-being are associated with the well-being of patients and are accounted as physical and mental health, job satisfaction, and job engagement. It affects patients and their views on the care quality received and the healthcare system regarding turnover rates and hiring and training costs. Over one million nurses are expected to retire by 2030, which would add to the shortage of nurses in the healthcare system (Flaubert et al., 2021). Therefore, retaining nurses and supporting new entries is fundamental to the healthcare workforce’s development, growth, and sustainability.

Lack of or poor nurse health and well-being is associated with high turnover rates, increasing the cost of hiring and training new nurses. The National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report provide that the healthcare system spends an average of $44,000 on replacing an RN. For hospitals, the turnover cost is about $3.6-6.1 million annually (Flaubert et al., 2021). With these effects on patients and the healthcare system, promoting and facilitating nurse health and well-being is critical to ensure a healthy workforce, patient health and safety, a functioning healthcare system, and the financial health of healthcare institutions.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Improve the Working Environment

Improving the working environment is an effective way to enhance nurse health and well-being. Work-related factors are attributed to poor or a lack of nurses’ health and well-being, including nurse burnout which is prevalent and has significant effects on patients, healthcare teams, and health organizations. Rates of burnout among nurses in the United States are between 35% and 45% (Flaubert et al., 2021). Burnout is associated with emotional exhaustion, a low sense of individual accomplishment, and depersonalization, leading to poor patient outcomes, increased healthcare costs, clinician illness, suicidal thoughts and actions, and high turnover rates (Flaubert et al., 2021). Nurse burnout is attributed to heavy workloads, overtime, staff shortages, skill-job mismatch, inadequate training, and heavy documentation (Flaubert et al., 2021). (Babapour et al., 2022) posits that prolonged stress, inadequate support, heavy workloads, many hours per shift, and conflict lead to compassion fatigue, which indicates a lack of nurse well-being.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Nurses report similar rates of substance use disorders as the general population, with about 10 percent reporting SUD (Flaubert et al., 2021). Nurses are also exposed to health problems related to SUD, including trauma and abuse history, substance use at an early age, genetic predisposition, and comorbid mental health disorders, but the risk of use increases due to easy access to controlled substances. High SUD rates among nurses are also linked to workplace stress and lack of education and adequate support (Flaubert et al., 2021). Nurses reporting poor health and well-being report poor physical health, including high overweight and obesity rates related to poor nutrition, lack of adequate sleep, and sedentary lifestyles or limited physical activities. Additionally, the healthcare environment presents ethical challenges that impact nurses’ moral well-being. According to Flaubert et al. (2021), moral distress affects nurse integrity, making responding to moral or ethical uncertainty, ethical dilemmas, and other moral concerns difficult. Moral suffering is a component of poor nurse health and well-being.

The constant interaction between nurses and patients, families, communities, administrators, and colleagues is necessary, but it can also cause stress that considerably impacts nurse well-being (Flaubert et al., 2021). Negative social interactions, including conflicts, discrimination, bullying, incivility, and racism, are to blame for nurses’ social health and well-being. Addressing workplace factors affecting nurse health and well-being, adopting self-care strategies, and provider education are interventions that can help improve nurse health and well-being. Solving work-related stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, workplace conflict, job engagement, workload issues, and working overtime can help improve the work environment, which is associated with enhanced nurse health and well-being (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Nurse leaders should establish healthy working environments to improve job experience and satisfaction.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Encourage Nurses to Adopt Self-care Strategies

Encouraging nurses to adopt self-care strategies is an effective way to enhance nurse health and well-being. Self-care is an intentional effort to cater to one’s mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. To care for others, nurses should first care for themselves because compassion fatigue, workplace stress, and burnout are associated with poor health-promoting self-care. Self-care is a self-management tool for nurses to reduce the stress from working in the healthcare environment. Lack of self-care is linked with burnout, poor physical and mental health, depression, weight gain or extreme weight loss, unhealthy eating patterns, demoralization, back injury, and reduced job satisfaction (Williams et al., 2022). More attention is needed to enhance self-care in nurses because self-care helps minimize stress, replenish nurses’ compassion capacity and ability to care for others, and improve the quality of care. Self-care serves as a stress management tool, helping nurses reduce work-related stress. Adopting self-care practices like mindfulness, self-compassion, and emotional regulation can help nurses reduce stress and attend to their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs (Hofmeyer et al., 2020).(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Poor health-promoting self-care is associated with burnout and compassion fatigue, leading to poor patient outcomes and the risk of medical errors. Nursing care relies on empathy and compassion; the more burned out or stressed a nurse is, the more their capacity to offer kindness and compassion suffers (Monroe et al., 2021). Self-care replenishes nurses’ compassion capacity and ability to care for others. Nurses must practice self-compassion and understand their needs before helping others. Nurses should also learn to talk kindly to themselves because kind self-talk is linked to increased compassion capacity and pro-social behaviors like kindness, empathy, and altruism, helping them communicate better with colleagues, patients, and their families (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). In addition, acting with kindness and compassion helps reduce patient suffering and distress. Conclusively, health-promoting self-care behavior is effective in improving nurse health and well-being and consequences such as performance, effective and efficient healthcare delivery, and patient outcomes.

Provide Education Sessions

Providing education sessions or empowered education is an effective way to enhance nurse health and well-being. Empowering education on strategies to improve nurse health and well-being is needed in the working environment. There is a lack of awareness regarding factors affecting nurse health and well-being, including burnout, stress, and compassion fatigue, which limits efforts to address these issues (Chaghari et al., 2017). For instance, nurses may not be aware if they are burnout, stressed, or lack compassion fatigue due to a lack of understanding. Provider education would help nurses understand their characteristics and nature, how to identify these feelings, and how to approach them, including strategies to address burnout, compassion fatigue, and stress to improve their overall well-being. Education strategies focusing on stress management and practical knowledge like dietary and workplace culture, shift management, and break times effectively improve nurses’ ability and capacity to care for themselves (Bak et al., 2020). Conclusively, nurses should be empowered through education to understand factors affecting their health and well-being and take proactive measures to promote health and well-being.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Opposition

Nurses should focus more on the patients and prioritize patient interests because patients’ needs come first. Nurses have continuously prioritized patient needs abiding by healthcare reforms to increase patient-centeredness and holistic care, which increase the scope of nursing and patient health needs. Strategies to address nurse health and well-being will require a lot of time, which is limited given current nurse shortages, increasing healthcare demands, and other competing priorities. There will be no time to explore work-related factors impacting nurse health and well-being and adequately educate nurses on health-promoting self-care strategies and empowering education.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

Refutation

Although patient interests and needs are a priority, nurses can only effectively care for others if they care for themselves. The ANA Code of Ethics requires nurses to extend to themselves the moral respect they extend to others, and nurses owe themselves the same duty they owe to other individuals (Purdue University Global, 2021). Factors such as nurse shortages and increasing healthcare demands impact nurse health and well-being, and addressing these factors should be the first step to improving nurse health and well-being.

Conclusion

Nursing is a demanding profession, and the work environment is pressuring and stressful, impacting nurse health and well-being. Work-related factors, including occupational stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, workplace conflict, heavy workloads, and working overtime, contribute to unhealthy nurse behavior, including poor health-promoting self-care behavior. Promoting a healthy work environment is the foundation of ensuring a healthy workforce. Self-care strategies and providing education are interventions that help improve nurse health and well-being, and if implemented, the future of the nursing profession and patient care is promising. Nurses should care for themselves before caring for others because it enhances their capacity to show compassion, empathy, and respect and address patient needs comprehensively. Proper health-promoting behavior among nurses also increases nurse engagement and energy levels, stressing the need for nurses to promote their health and well-being. There is a correlation between nurses’ health and well-being and patient health outcomes. Nurse leaders should emphasize promoting nurse health and well-being by adopting interventions to improve patient outcomes.(Nursing Work-related factors Essay-Sample)

References

Babapour, A. R., Gahassab-Mozaffari, N., & Fathnezhad-Kazemi, A. (2022). Nurses’ job stress and its impact on quality of life and caring behaviors: A cross-sectional study. BMC nursing, 21(1), 1-10.

Bak, M. A., Hoyle, L. P., Mahoney, C., & Kyle, R. G. (2020). Strategies to promote nurses’ health: A qualitative study with student nurses. Nurse Education in Practice, 48, 102860.

Chaghari, M., Saffari, M., Ebadi, A., & Ameryoun, A. (2017). Empowering Education: A New Model for In-service Training of Nursing Staff. Journal of advances in medical education & professionalism, 5(1), 26–32.

Flaubert, J. L., Le Menestrel, S., Williams, D. R., & Wakefield, M. K. (2021). The future of nursing 2020-2030: Charting a path to achieve health equity.

Hofmeyer, A., Taylor, R., & Kennedy, K. (2020). Knowledge for nurses to better care for themselves so they can better care for others during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Nurse education today, 94, 104503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2020.104503

Monroe, C., Loresto, F., Horton-Deutsch, S., Kleiner, C., Eron, K., Varney, R., & Grimm, S. (2021). The value of intentional self-care practices: The effects of mindfulness on improving job satisfaction, teamwork, and workplace environments. Archives of psychiatric nursing, 35(2), 189–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnu.2020.10.003

Purdue University Global. (2021, April 28). The importance of self-care for nurses and how to put a plan in place. https://www.purdueglobal.edu/nursing/self-care-for-nurses/

The University of Rhode Island. (2021, July 19). The Importance of Nurse Well-Being. https://online.uri.edu/articles/importance-of-nurse-well-being.aspx

Williams, S. G., Fruh, S., Barinas, J. L., & Graves, R. J. (2022). Self-Care in Nurses. Journal of radiology nursing, 41(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jradnu.2021.11.001