Organizational Attributes Valued by Hospital, Home Care, and District Nurses in the United States and New Zealand

Abstract

To determine whether hospital-based, home care, and district nurses identify a core set of organizational attributes in the nursing work environment that they value as important to the support of professional practice. Survey data, collected in 2002-2003 from 403 home care nurses in the United States (US) and 320 district nurses in New Zealand (NZ), were pooled with an existing data set of 669 hospital-based nurses to conduct this descriptive, nonexperimental study. The importance of organizational attributes in the nursing work environment was measured using the Nursing Work Index-Revised (NWI-R). Frequency distributions and analysis of variance were used to analyze the data. At least 80% of hospital-based, home care, and district nurses either agreed or strongly agreed that 47 of the 49 items comprising the NWI-R represented organizational attributes they considered important to the support of their professional nursing practice. Mean importance scores among home care nurses, however, were significantly lower than were those of the other two groups. Overall, hospital-based, home care, and district nurses had a high level of agreement regarding the importance of organizational traits to the support of their professional practice. The intensity of the attributes' importance was less among home care nurses. Further research is needed to determine whether this set of organizational traits, measured using the NWI-R, is associated with positive nurse and patient outcomes in home care and district nursing practice, as has been shown in acute care settings.