| Learning Objective #1: Compare home care and hospital-based nurses on those organizational traits considered important to their professional practice | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Describe the subset of global organizational traits important to nurses in both practice settings |
Objective: Magnet hospital studies indicate that those organizational attributes valued by nurses as important to practice have a positive affect on both nurse and patient outcomes. However, the magnet program of research has been limited to hospitals. It is unknown if the same set of organizational traits are valued by nurses across practice settings. The purpose of this study, funded by the American Nurses Foundation, was to extend the magnet concept into home care through the following objectives: (1) Compare home care and hospital-based nurses on organizational attributes important to their practice; (2) Identify a core set of global organizational attributes that are valued by nurses in both practice arenas. Design: Cross-section survey and secondary analysis. Sample: Primary data were collected from 403 home care nurses representing 47 states. The data were merged with responses from 669 hospital-based nurses from a secondary data set, resulting in a total sample of 1,072 nurses. Variables: Organizational attributes as listed on the Nursing Work Index-Revised (NWI-R). Methods: Survey methodology was used to obtain responses from home care nurses on the "importance" scale of the NWI-R, rating the importance of attributes to their professional practice. Data were merged with a secondary source (R01NR02280) containing responses of hospital-based nurses on the same scale. Analytic techniques included frequency distributions, independent t-tests, and logistic regression. Findings: A total of 28 of the 55 attributes depicted by the NWI-R were rated as important by both home care and hospital nurses. Hospital-based nurses had signficantly higher mean importance scores on the total NWI-R and all 5 of its subscales. Conclusions: The subset of commonly valued attributes identified in this study may represent a core of global organizational traits whose importance to nursing transcends practice settings. Implications: The NWI-R may need revision for use in home care outcomes research.
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