Factors related to a successful professional development for specialist nurses in surgical care: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND: A high level of competence among staff is necessary for providing patient-safe surgical care. Knowledge regarding what factors contribute to the professional development of specialist nurses in surgical care and why they choose to remain in the workplace despite high work requirements is needed. To investigate and describe the organizational and social work environment of specialist nurses in surgical care as part of studying factors that impact on professional development. METHOD: This was a cross-sectional study with a strategic convenience sampling procedure that recruited 73 specialist nurses in surgical care in Sweden between October to December 2021. The study was guided by STROBE Statement and checklist of cross-sectional studies. The validated Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire was used, and additional demographic data. Descriptive statistics were performed and the comparison to the population benchmarks was presented as the mean with a 95% confidence interval. To study potential differences among the demographic and professional characteristics, pairwise t tests were used with Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons with a significance level of 5%. RESULTS: Five domains were identified as factors related to success, as they received higher scores in relation to population benchmarks: quality of leadership, variation of work, meaning of work and work engagement as well as job insecurity. There was also a significant association between a having a manager with low nursing education and job insecurity (p = 0.021). CONCLUSIONS: Quality of leadership is important for the professional development of specialist nurses in surgical care. Strategic work seems to include managers with a higher nursing education level to prevent insecure professional working conditions.

The Face of Workplace Violence: Experiences of Healthcare Professionals in Surgical Hospital Wards.

BACKGROUND: Though workplace violence (WPV) is a global problem for healthcare professionals, research within in-hospital care has mainly focused on WPV in emergency healthcare settings. Thus, the number of qualitative studies that explores experiences of WPV in general hospital wards with a longer length of stay is limited. AIM: The aim of this study was to explore how healthcare professionals in surgical hospital wards experience and manage WPV perpetrated by patients or visitors. METHOD: The study applied a qualitative, inductive approach using focus group interviews for data collection. A purposeful sample of 16 healthcare professionals working in surgical wards was included. Data were analysed using a thematic analysis. Findings. The analysis resulted in four main themes: workplace violence characteristics, partly predictable yet not prevented, approaching workplace violence, and consequences from workplace violence. During the focus group interviews, the healthcare professionals described various acts of physical violence, verbal abuse, and gender discrimination perpetrated by patients or their visitors. Despite the predictability of some of the incidents, preventive strategies were absent or inadequate, with the healthcare professionals not knowing how to react in these threatful or violent situations. They experienced that WPV could result in negative consequences for the care of both the threatful or violent person and the other patients in the ward. WPV caused the healthcare professionals to feel exposed, scared, and unprotected. Conclusion and clinical implications. Exposure to WPV is a problem for healthcare professionals in surgical wards and has consequences for the patients. Preventive strategies, guidelines, and action plans are urgently needed to minimise the risk of WPV and to ensure a safe work and care environment.