PLENARY 3: Creating Healthy Work Environments Using Evidence-Based Tools: A Must in Health Care Settings to Enable Clinical Excellence!

Description/Overview: Toxic workplaces can have a detrimental effect on nursing staff and the patients they care for. Today's healthy care workplaces are often characterized by disharmony, bullying, pressure, conflict, and despair such that many nurses stay away from work to take a break, not from the "work of nursing", but from the "work environment of nursing." While all clinicans are expected to utilize best evidence in their clinical decision making, it is not yet the norm that management decisions also be based on best evidence -- evidence that can help transform troubled work places into trend setting healthy work environments. Unhealthy work environments cost organizations thousands of dollars annually as recruitment, retention, and adverse events are impacted by work places that do not support staff, as members of highly functional effective teams. Health care professionals working in toxic environments are hard pressed to give the highest quality care, when they are struggling to survive ineffective leadership, work place violence, lack of team work, and colleagues that don't care. The Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO), recognizing the link between clinical excellence, positive outcomes for patients, providers, and organizations, and healthy work environments made a bold decision 10 years ago to include Healthy Work Environment Best Practice Guidelines along with clinical guidelines as part of its best practice guideline development and implementation program. These healthy work environment best practices address such areas as leadership, professionalism, teamwork, diversity, workload and staffing, workplace safety, workplace violence, conflict and fatigue. This presentation will provide evidence-based resources and tools for all nurses to examine their places of work, and take steps to make personal changes as well as to advocate for broader organizational and system chagne to enable healthy workplaces that truly facilitate the knowledge and caring work of nurses.