Effects of nursing work environment on the quality of work life of nurses

ABSTRACT Effects of Nursing Work Environment on the Quality of Work Life of Nurses The aim of this study is to determine the effect of nursing work environment on the quality of work life of nurses. This descriptive and relational study was conducted between April 2018 and May 2018 with 330 nurses who worked at a private university hospital in Istanbul for at least six months and volunteered to participate in the study. The data were collected with the Quality of Nursing Work Life Scale, the Nursing Work Index - The Practice Work Environment Scale and the 17-item Questionnaire developed by the researcher to determine nurses' sociodemographic characteristics, occupational and working conditions. In the analysis of the data, descriptive analysis, the independent t test, Mann Whitney U test, one-way variance analysis in independent groups (advanced analysis with the Tukey HSD) and Kruskal Wallis test (advanced analysis with the Bonferroni corrected Mann Whitney U test) and Pearson correlation analysis were used. It was determined that nurses' quality of work life level was above average and their nursing work environment level was medium. While there was no statistically significant correlation between the nurses' quality of work life score and the variables such as age, marital status and having children, a statistically significant correlation was determined between their quality of work life score and the variables such as gender, educational status, occupational position, unit worked in, total length of service, length of service in the institution, length of service in the unit, type of shift, working in the unit willingly, working overtime, length of overtime, the number of night shifts, salary, the perception of workload, satisfaction with the institution, satisfaction with the social facilities provided by the institution, and meeting the career goal. A positive, strong and highly significant relationship was determined between the nursing work environment and the nurses' quality of work life(r=0.62; p<0.001). In conclusion, healthy nursing work environment positively affects the quality of work life of nurses. Managers' developing strategies to create healthy working environments can contribute to the improvement of the quality of work life of nurses. Keywords: Nursing, nursing work environment, quality of work life