The Satisfaction for the Organizational Health in Nurses Working in Intensive Care and Accident & Emergency Departments in Different Healthcare Organizations of Rome and its Metropolitan Area

Introduction: The satisfaction for the organizational health in nurses is fundamental to provide safe and high quality care. Between 2009 and 2011, the research team conducted a survey to measure organizational health and its level of satisfaction in nurses working in various health centres in Rome and its metropolitan area, including intensive care units and accident & emergency departments. Materials and methods: In this study it was used a validated tool developed in 2010, the Nursing Organizational Health Questionnaire. The statistic analysis of the data was performed by means of the SPSS 19.0 package. Results: Dimensions of organizational health calculated in relation to the mean cut-off value of 2.6 showed a poor job environment comfort, high levels of stress and a scarce openness to innovation. Regarding the satisfaction for the organizational health, 28% of the nurses were fully satisfied, 35% were unsatisfied and 37% showed reasonable levels of satisfaction. Stronger associations with dissatisfaction were observed for the following domains: job environment comfort, organizational context, safety and accident prevention and openness to innovation. Discussion: Healthcare organizations involved in this study ought to intervene on various intrinsic factors linked to the job (job environment comfort, organizational context, openness to innovation and safety and accident prevention) to improve the satisfaction for nurses’ organizational health. Conclusions: The quality of life and wellbeing of health professionals and of the organizations are linked to the capacity to provide high quality care to patients, especially in areas that have a very stressful impact, such as the intensive care units and the accident and emergency fields. Therefore, the organizational features become instrumental to achieving high quality care outcomes and should be the target of interventions in the healthcare centres included in the study.