Intensive care nursing is a professionally challenging role, elucidated in the body of research focusing on nurses' ill-being, including burnout, stress, moral distress and compassion fatigue. Although scant, research is growing in relation to the elements contributing to critical care nurses' workplace well-being. Little is currently known about how intensive care nurse well-being is strengthened in the workplace, particularly from the intensive care nurse perspective.Identify intensive care nurses' perspectives of strategies that strengthen their workplace well-being.An inductive descriptive qualitative approach was used to explore intensive care nurses' perspectives of strengthening work well-being.New Zealand intensive care nurses were asked to report strategies strengthening their workplace well-being in two free-text response items within a larger online survey of well-being.Sixty-five intensive care nurses identified 69 unique strengtheners of workplace well-being. Strengtheners included nurses drawing from personal resources, such as mindfulness and yoga. Both relational and organizational systems' strengtheners were also evident, including peer supervision, formal debriefing and working as a team to support each other.Strengtheners of intensive care nurses' workplace well-being extended across individual, relational and organizational resources. Actions such as simplifying their lives, giving and receiving team support and accessing employee assistance programmes were just a few of the intensive care nurses' identified strengtheners. These findings inform future strategic workplace well-being programmes, creating opportunities for positive change.Intensive care nurses have a highly developed understanding of workplace well-being strengtheners. These strengtheners extend from the personal to inter-professional to organizational. The extensive range of strengtheners the nurses have identified provides a rich source for the development of future workplace well-being programmes for critical care.
Intensive care nurse wellbeing is essential to a healthy healthcare workforce. Enhanced wellbeing has widespread benefits for workers. Bibliometrics enables quantitative analysis of bourgeoning online data. Here, a new model is developed and applied to explore empirical knowledge underpinning wellbeing and intensive care nurse wellbeing in terms of size and impact, disciplinary reach, and semantics. Mixed methods bibliometric study. Firstly, a new model coined 'iAnalysis' was developed for the analysis of published data. Secondly, iAnalysis was applied in two studies to examine wellbeing and ICU nurse wellbeing. Study one explored data from a title search with search terms [wellbeing OR well-being], identifying 17,543 records with bibliographic data. This dataset included 20,526 keywords. Of the identified records, 10,715 full-text manuscripts were retrieved. Study two explored data from a topic search with search terms [(intensive OR critical) AND (nurs*) AND (wellbeing OR well-being)], identifying 383 records with bibliographic data. This dataset included 1223 author keywords. Of the identified records, 328 full-text manuscripts were retrieved. Once data were collected, for size and impact, WoS Clarivate Analytics™ and RStudio™ were used to explore publication dates, frequencies, and citation performance. For disciplinary reach, RStudio™ (with the Bibliometrics™ package & Vosviewer™ plugin) was used to explore the records in terms of country of publication, journal presence, and mapping of authors. For semantics, once the bibliographic data was imported to RStudio™ (with the Bibliometrics™ package & Vosviewer™ plugin) keyword co-occurrences were identified and visualised. Full-text manuscripts were imported to NVivo™ to explore word frequencies of both the keywords and full-text manuscripts using the word frequency search. For both studies, records were predominantly published in the past 5 years, in English language, and from USA. The highest keyword co-occurrence for study one was "health and well-being", and for study two, "family and model". Terms commonly associated with 'illbeing', as opposed to 'wellbeing', were highly prevalent in both study datasets, but more so in intensive care nurse wellbeing data. Intensive care nurse wellbeing was virtually absent in this literature. The iAnalysis model provided a practice-friendly tool to explore a large source of online published literature.
Abstract Background A major problem in quantifying symptoms of schizophrenia is establishing a reliable distinction between enduring and dynamic aspects of psychopathology. This is critical for accurate diagnosis, monitoring and evaluating treatment effects in both clinical practice and trials. Materials and methods We applied Generalizability Theory, a robust novel method to distinguish between dynamic and stable aspects of schizophrenia symptoms in the widely used Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) using a longitudinal measurement design. The sample included 107 patients with chronic schizophrenia assessed using the PANSS at five time points over a 24‐week period during a multi‐site clinical trial of N‐Acetylcysteine as an add‐on to maintenance medication for the treatment of chronic schizophrenia. Results The original PANSS and its three subscales demonstrated good reliability and generalizability of scores (G = 0.77‐0.93) across sample population and occasions making them suitable for assessment of psychosis risks and long‐lasting change following a treatment, while subscales of the five‐factor models appeared less reliable. The most enduring symptoms represented by the PANSS were poor attention, delusions, blunted affect and poor rapport. More dynamic symptoms with 40%‐50% of variance explained by patient transient state including grandiosity, preoccupation, somatic concerns, guilt feeling and hallucinatory behaviour. Conclusions Identified dynamic symptoms are more amendable to change and should be the primary target of interventions aiming at effectively treating schizophrenia. Separating out the dynamic symptoms would increase assay sensitivity in trials, reduce the signal to noise ratio and increase the potential to detect the effects of novel therapies in clinical trials.
There had been little focus on the well-being of intensive care nurses until a recent programme of research found work well-being to be best described as a collection of elements, a multifaceted construct. Strengtheners of intensive care nurses' work well-being were found to extend across individual, relational, and organizational resources. Actions such as simplifying their lives, giving and receiving team support, and accessing employee assistance programmes were just a few of the intensive care nurses' identified strengtheners.To synthesize intensive care nurse perceptions of work well-being characteristics and strengtheners to identify opportunities for job crafting and redesign.This was a qualitative secondary analysis.Intensive care nurse work well-being characteristics and strengtheners were explored using applied thematic analysis and pre-design, open card-sort technique.Five facets were identified in the analysis: (a) healthy, (b) authentic, (c) meaningful, (d) connected, and (e) innovative. These five facets were described from a theoretical perspective and illustrated as a conceptual model for intensive care nurse job crafting and redesign.The proposed conceptual model contributes new knowledge to be explored in meaningful discussions about intensive care nurse work well-being and empirically investigated in terms of construct validity and theory development. Furthermore, the model provides practical opportunities to explore individual and collaborative ways to enhance intensive care nurse work well-being across a range of levels.Opportunities for job crafting and redesign were identified and presented in a conceptual model of intensive care nurse work well-being. This model provides individual nurses, intensive care teams, health care organizations, and workers' well-being programme and policy developers practical opportunities to explore individual and collaborative ways to enhance intensive care nurse work well-being.
Prototype analyses of well-being have identified central characteristics and prototypicality for New Zealand teachers, lawyers, adolescents, and work well-being of nurses. What has not yet been explored is the broad construct of well-being in intensive care nurses.To identify intensive care nurses' conceptions of general well-being and investigate whether their general well-being is prototypically organized.Prototype analysis.Three linked studies conceptualize well-being in this prototype analysis. In study 1, nurses reported features of well-being. Study 2 investigated the organization of these features. Study 3 sought confirmation of prototypical organization.Sixty-five New Zealand nurses participated. For study 1 (n = 23), the most frequently reported elements of well-being included physical health (n = 26), work-life balance (n = 20), and personal relationships (n = 18). For study 2 (n = 25), the highest rated elements included mental and emotional health, [general] health, work-life balance, and love. Work-life balance, physical health, and personal relationships were in the top five most frequently reported and were rated in the top 12 most central. Overall, ratings of centrality and the number of times reported were positively correlated (r = 0.33, P < .005). For study 3 (n = 17), confirmatory analyses did not reach statistical significance (P = .15).Physical health, work-life balance, and personal relationships are key characteristics of well-being for intensive care nurses. Mental, emotional, and general health and work-life balance were considered most important for well-being.Physical health, work-life balance, and personal relationships are key characteristics of well-being for intensive care nurses. These characteristics of the broad construct of well-being are helpful in both defining and identifying conceptual models of well-being that may be used to inform the development and measurement of well-being programmes.
Accurately conceptualizing intensive care nurse work well-being is fundamental for successful engagement with workplace well-being interventions. Little is currently known about intensive care nurse work well-being.The study aimed to identify intensive care nurses' conceptions of work well-being and ascertain whether the term 'work well-being' is prototypically organized.Three linked studies conceptualize intensive care nurse well-being. For study one, participants listed key features of work well-being as free-text responses. Study two measured whether there was prototypical organization of these responses. Study three sought to confirm the prototypical organization of the term 'work well-being' through narrative ratings.A total of 82 New Zealand intensive care nurses were randomly allocated to the three studies; 65 participated. In study one (n = 23), the most frequently endorsed elements included: workload (n = 14), job satisfaction (n = 13) and support (n = 13). In study two (n = 25), the highest rated elements included: feeling valued, respect, support, work-life balance and workplace culture. Elements of support, work-life balance and workload were in the top five most frequently endorsed elements and were also rated in the top 12 most central. Overall, the ratings of centrality and number of endorsements were positively correlated (r = 0.35, P < 0.05). In study three (n = 17), nine participants selected the same rating across both narratives with no differentiation on the 11-point scale and were excluded from analysis. The mean score for the central narrative was 7.88 and for the peripheral narrative was 7.38. Confirmatory analyses did not reach statistical significance.Unique conceptions of work well-being were identified. Workload and work-life balance were central characteristics. Feeling valued and experiencing respect and support were considered most important.Intensive care nurse conceptions of work well-being are fundamental for future measures of work well-being and future interventional studies and initiatives.
AbstractBackground: Outcome measurement is pivotal to person-centred assessment, quality improvement and research. Children and young people with life-limiting and -threatening illness have high needs and service use, yet there is a lack of evidence for interventions and care models. Efforts to strengthen paediatric palliative care (PPC) services has been hampered by the lack of an appropriate outcome measure. Objective: To determine the validity, reliability, measurement invariance, responsiveness, acceptability, and interpretability properties of the novel Children’s Palliative care Outcome Scale (C-POS). Methods: We recruited children (0-17 years) with life-limiting illness and their families in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Using C-POS repeated measurement using over four timepoints. we assessed: 1 The objectives were to determine: 1)construct validity (structural properties, discriminant validity, known groups validity, measurement invariance, differential item functioning by country), 2) reliability (internal consistency and test re-test), 3) responsiveness, 4) acceptability (time to complete) and 5) interpretability. Results: We recruited a cohort of 434 children (response rate 94%). Of these, 302 participated in the repeated measures component and 279 (92%) completed four datapoints. We found evidence for face and content validity as the C-POS items mapped on to themes developed from qualitative interviews, including: pain and other symptoms, pyscho-social well-being, and family wellbeing that matter to children and their families. We confirmed the two-factor structure (child and family subscales). We confirmed discriminant and known groups validity, as well as construct equivalence for the child and proxy versions. Controlling for age, we found no differential item functioning by country setting. 2)The sub-scale internal consistency was moderate, given the multi-dimensional nature of the C-POS self and proxy report versions omega scores (0.67 and 0.73, respectively). The test characteristic curve information confirmed the moderate internal subscale consistency scores between 0.3 to 0.9 for the proxy version and 0.3-0.5 for the self-report version. Test-retest reliability was acceptable for all items, with weighted kappa range for scores: self-report (0.43-0.57) and proxy version (0.35-0.64) and family items (0.51-0.71). 3)Responsiveness was demonstrated, except for the feeding item. 4)Median completion time at the last visit was 10 minutes for both versions with minimal missing data. 5)The minimum important difference was 3 for the self and proxy report versions on a scale of 0-30 and 4 for the child and family scale on a scale of 0-55. Conclusions and relevance: The C-POS has good psychometric properties. To optimise C-POS, from the data we identified items for potential removal, and further domains for which developmental age-appropriate items are needed. C-POS has potential to evaluate and improve person-centred children’s palliative care in both research and routine clinical practice.