The study, "Organizational Attributes Valued by Hospital, Home Care and District Nurses in the United States and New Zealand," is featured in the first quarter issue of the Journal of Nursing Scholarship (volume 37 issue 1) published in late March 2005.
Almost two decades of research indicates that organizational traits such as professional autonomy, collaborative relationships with physicians, and access to resources needed to provide quality care, are associated with higher nurse retention and lower in-patient mortality in hospitals. However less is known how these organizational traits support other nursing practices such as home care nursing and district nursing, its international counterpart, according to Linda Flynn, assistant professor at the College of Nursing at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. This becomes more important as the population ages and the demand for home care and district nursing increases.
"We know that organizational work traits predict important things like patient mortality, nurse retention and job satisfaction in hospitals," said Flynn, a Center Valley, PA, resident. "So we want to find out if these organizational traits, which help support and enhance a nurse's work environment in a hospital, are important in other settings like home care and district nursing."
The study features the results of a survey of home care nurses in the United States and district nurses in New Zealand based on the Nursing Work Index-Revised (NWI-R) designed to measure the degree to which these organizational traits are
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Contact: Miguel Tersy
miguel@nightingale.rutgers.edu
973-353-5293
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
28-Mar-2005