The relationships among safety climate, occupational burnout, and psychosocial factors for hospital nurses: Using structural equation modeling

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is very important to pay attention to the mental health of nurses because it affects their career performance and personal life. Our aim was to apply a theoretical model to investigate the structural relationships among safety climate, occupational burnout, and workplace psychosocial factors for nurses. The current cross-sectional study was conducted on 319 nurses in a selected hospital in Iran. Data were collected using the questionnaires of Nurses’ Safety Climate, Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, and the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationships among the variables. The analysis was done in Amos-24 and SPSS-24 software. Structural equation modeling showed negative correlation between occupational burnout and safety climate (r = −0.41) as well as occupational burnout and workplace psychosocial factor (r = −0.85), and a positive correlation between safety climate and psychosocial factors (r = 0.50). So it could be inferred that a decrease in the level of safety climate will increase occupational burnout which will, in turn, promote the risk of psychosocial factors in the workplace. Promoting and improving nurses’ level of safety climate could reduce occupational burnout and the risk of psychosocial factors in the workplace, which will ultimately promote nurse’s mental health.