Influencing factors of nursing work environment in ClassII andIII hospitals of Guangdong Province

Abstract

Objective To explore the influencing factors of nursing work environment in Class Ⅱ and Ⅲ hospitals of Guangdong Province. Methods Totals of 1 904 nurses of 133 wards from 23 Class Ⅱ and Ⅲ hospitals of Guangdong Province were investigated with the questionnaires in 2014. The hospital questionnaire was used to investigate hospital level, place and level of technical force. The ward questionnaire was applied to investigate ward types and the number of nurses. The nurse questionnaires included the general information questionnaire and the Practice Environment Scale of Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI) . The EpiData 3.1, SPSS 19.0 and MLwiN 2.32 were used to build a database, statistical description and multilevel models regression analysis respectively. Results A total of 71.6% of 1 904 nurses was dissatisfied with payment and 56.2% of them reported working overtime. The nurses, wards and general information of hospitals were taken as the explaining variable to be led into three-level model. The results showed that nurses who had low educational background (β=0.140-0.209, P<0.05) and high satisfaction with payment (β=0.138-0.513, P<0.001) were with high assessment for five aspects of work environment. Nurses whose work did not time out (β=0.064-0.076, P<0.05) , wards were with nurse-patient ratio reaching the standard (β=0.082-0.118, P<0.05) , were in surgical department (β=0.130-0.148, P<0.05) , whose hospitals was with a low level of technical force (β=0.093-0.209, P<0.05) had higher assessment for work environment than those were with work timeout, whose wards were with nurse-patient ratio not reaching the standard, were in Intensive Care Unit (ICU) , whose hospitals was with a high level of technical force (P<0.05) . Conclusions The influencing factors of nursing work environment assessed by nurses include initial educational background, payment satisfaction, working load (working overtime and nurse-patient ratio) , types of wards and hospital technical force. Creating a good nursing work environment needs to attach importance to building of talent team, improve payment satisfaction and guarantee manpower allocation to stabilize nurses team so as to fundamentally improve the quality of nursing service. Key words: Nurses; Nursing work environment; Influencing factors