Explanation:
The safety of nurses from workplace-induced injuries and illnesses is important to nurses themselves as well as to the patients they serve. The presence of healthy and well-rested nurses is critical to providing vigilant monitoring, empathic patient care, and vigorous advocacy. Many workplace stressors that can produce diseases and injuries are present in nursing work environments. These stressors include factors related to the immediate work context, characteristics of the organization, and changes that are occurring external to the organization but throughout the health care industry.1 Nurses experience significant physical and psychological demands during their day, as well as a work safety climate that can be adverse. Pressures within organizations to downsize, use nurses employed under alternative arrangements (pool and traveling staff), and the turnaround time for patient care (early discharge, higher patient loads) are examples of factors that are determined at an organizational level. The external context within which nurses practice includes lean managed care contracts, increasing use of complex technological innovations, an older nurse workforce, and increasing numbers of very sick elderly patients (aging population). Factors at each of these levels can produce threats to nurses’ safety while on the job.
The hazards of nursing work can impair health both acutely and in the long term. These health outcomes include musculoskeletal injuries/disorders, other injuries, infections, changes in mental health, and in the longer term, cardiovascular, metabolic, and neoplastic diseases. In this chapter we will present major research findings that link common work stressors and hazards to selected health outcomes. These stressors include aspects of the way work is organized in nursing (e.g., shift work, long hours, and overtime) and psychological job demands, such as work pace
