The environment in which nurses’ practice, can have a significant impact on the quality of care they provide, the level of teamwork in the unit and the satisfaction and outcomes that patients experience. The AACN Standards for Establishing and Sustaining Healthy Work Environments identify six standards that should be in place in order to create and sustain a healthy work environment (HWE).
Emergency Departments are high stress, see high volumes of patients and experience life and death situations often. It is imperative to have, skilled communication, true collaboration, effective decision making, appropriate staffing, meaningful recognition, and authentic leadership to provide safe, effective and exemplary care to patients and their families.
The incivility spiral framework demonstrates how uncivil behavior in an environment will eventually lead to more aggressive behavior. Providing education and implementing interventions to align with the healthy work environment standards can help decrease incivility, improve the environment for all staff, patients and families.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of healthy work environment interventions implemented by a shared governance council on improving incivility in a pediatric emergency department. A pre and post survey design was used. The only relationship found of statistical significance was between years of experience and the total Cortina score. Years of experience was noted to be negatively correlated (r= -.312, p=0.26), at a 0.05 level of significance with increased experiences of incivility.