Healthy workplaces ‘a critical issue’
Tuesday November 20, 2007 -- Jason Thompson
Irmajean Bajnok says a focus on healthy work environments for healthcare providers is a necessary pre-cursor for quality patient care.

The director of international affairs and the best practice guidelines program with the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), Bajnok says the RNAO has developed a series of six best practice guidelines to help healthcare organizations achieve healthy workplaces.

Unhealthy and stressful workplaces in the healthcare setting made headlines recently with the release of a Statistics Canada report saying healthcare providers, especially doctors and nurses, are experiencing higher levels of stress on the job than the rest of the Canadian workforce.

To read the story published on HIROC News, click here.

The findings of the Statistics Canada study mirrors the results of the 2005 National Survey of the Work and Health of Nurses which was released a year ago and is based on responses from more than 19,000 nurses.

“It’s such a critical issue in healthcare,” she says, noting that healthy workplaces help breed clinical excellence.

“In those healthcare organizations where they had the elements of a healthy work environment, they were better able to focus on clinical excellence,” she says. “More and more research is out there showing the relationship between leadership to nurse satisfaction to patient outcomes. It’s something that we really have to address.”

Available online, the RNAO has developed six best practice guidelines to help healthcare organizations implement healthy workplaces.

The guidelines focus on specific aspects of what the RNAO believes constitutes a healthy work environment.

These include developing and sustaining nursing leadership, collaborative practice among nursing teams, developing and sustaining effective staffing and workload practices, embracing cultural diversity in healthcare, professionalism in nursing and workplace health, safety and well-being for nurses.

Even from the get-go, Bajnok says many units involved noticed the value of the guidelines. For some, just knowing that a healthy workplace for front-line care providers was on the administration’s agenda was re-assuring.

The RNAO also has a couple of options available for organizations who would like help implementing the guidelines.

The first is through a program called the Best Practice Spotlight Organization, which are healthcare organizations selected by the RNAO through a request for proposals process to implement, evaluate and share lessons learned from their guideline experiences and research findings.

The RNAO has also established a Centre for Professional Nursing Excellence, which acts a consulting service to help organizations implement best practice guidelines.

For more information on the best practice guidelines for a healthy workplace, click here.