Exploring the Importance of Empowerment: The Key to Nurse Well-Being

Nursing is the nation’s largest healthcare profession, with almost 4.7 million registered nurses (RNs) across the country. They play a critical role in all health and aged care settings, working on the front lines for promotion, prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation.
In many countries, nurses make up half of all healthcare professionals and are vital to how health actions are organized and applied. Unfortunately, the noble profession is sometimes the unsung hero of the healthcare industry and burnout is on the rise.
While nursing has always been seen as a hard but rewarding job, research has found stress and burnout rates have been rising. This has been a contributing factor to the nursing shortage that is impacting many countries, including the United States.
That’s why exploring workplace empowerment and how it can improve nurse well-being is important. It could be the key to improving stress and burnout in the profession, improving turnover rates and work satisfaction.
Creating A Supportive Work Environment
Research has shown that creating a supportive work environment is beneficial for empowering nurses. For example, this includes allowing flexible work arrangements—Does the workplace offer alternate shift lengths? Can you get a doctorate in nursing while you continue to work?
There are different strategies clinics and hospitals can employ to foster a positive and supportive work environment. These include:
- Team-building events to promote collaboration and positive professional relationships.
- Ensure appropriate staffing. If nurses are constantly doing mandatory overtime, this can lead to an increased risk of burnout and psychological distress.
- Support a positive work-life balance. Show you care about your staff’s well-being by offering flexible work schedules and encouraging time off.
- Make safety a priority. With violence against healthcare professionals on the rise, promoting workplace safety can help staff feel more comfortable and secure.
Statistics show that a positive work environment can contribute to solving many issues the nursing workforce is facing. These include work satisfaction, mandatory overtime, emotional well-being, and low retention rates.
A study from 2022 revealed that employees who are satisfied with their work environment are more likely to have positive work output. On the other hand, a negative workplace environment can lead to stress and emotional exhaustion.
Why Empowerment Is Essential
The American Heart Association (AHA) has recently revealed that nurses have a 14% higher-than-average incidence of poor cardiac health due to job stress. Nurse well-being is important for more than just job burnout; it is also important for the individual worker’s health.
The above statistic is just one of the many adverse consequences of nurse burnout and stress. Fortunately, studies over the years indicate that empowerment within the workplace is the key to employee well-being.
Empowerment is associated with less job tension, better work outcomes, and more engagement. According to an article published in Nursing Management, empowerment requires leadership that is “inclusive, non-authoritarian, visionary, and emotionally intelligent.”
Aside from leadership, there are several other ways to empower a workplace and employees. These include:
- Ensuring clear roles and goals are defined. This is especially important in teams when setting boundaries and expectations.
- Provide all the necessary working tools. Your employees should always be able to access the tools and technology they need to do their job properly.
- Allowing employees to have greater professional autonomy can also be empowering for them. Autonomy has been linked to better work performance and satisfaction. Whilst it isn’t always possible in a healthcare setting, it can give a greater sense of responsibility.
- No matter the industry, strong and effective communication is always good for empowerment. Employees feel empowered if they’re in a work setting that encourages open communication and feedback is listened to.
When it comes to empowerment and dealing with nurse distress, it’s important to remember the problem often comes from the top down. It is a failure of management, and not only does it endanger providers, but it can also affect the quality of care and patient safety.
What Is Well-Being?
Well-being refers to a person’s overall state, encompassing physical and emotional health. Professional well-being describes an individual’s state of feeling comfortable, healthy, and happy at their workplace.
Many factors can contribute to a nurse’s professional well-being. This includes the work-life balance, job security, workplace environment, colleagues, income, and even patient interactions.
The Importance Of Nurse Well-Being
More than ever, a nurse’s well-being at work in a clinical setting is crucial because of how it impacts performance and quality of care. Unfortunately, we are currently facing a well-being crisis with a study revealing that 53.6% of nurses feel low levels of well-being.
These low levels of well-being are directly correlated to nurses feeling stressed, experiencing compassion fatigue, and resulting in burnout. These also lead to nurses deciding to retire or change career paths.
More than half of surveyed nurses in the United States reported symptoms of burnout. This is worrying because there is currently a nurse workforce shortage. The World Health Organization estimates there will be a 4.5 million shortage of nurses worldwide by the year 2030.
Deploying strategies to improve empowerment in hospitals and clinics and increase nurse well-being will be critical in the coming years. The healthcare industry will be facing a mental health crisis and a rapidly aging population, which will require nurses to provide primary care.
Many of the stress and burnout problems nurses face were also exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has also led to negative connotations regarding workload being attached to the profession, acting as a deterrent for students potentially considering the career path.
Empowerment and enhancing nurse well-being could help the profession distance itself from its current reputation.
Empowerment and focusing on enhancing nurse well-being could help the profession distance itself from its current reputation—improving the retention rate and students studying nursing courses.
For people interested in nursing, it is one of the best and safest career paths available. It is one of the fastest-growing occupations and there will always be demand for healthcare professions.
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