“Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is committed to building a national Culture of Health that enables all in our diverse society to lead healthier lives now and for generations to come. A Culture of Health is broadly defined as one in which good health and well-being flourish across geographic, demographic, and social sectors; fostering healthy equitable communities guides public and private decision making; and everyone has the opportunity to make choices that lead to healthy lifestyles.” (http://www.evidenceforaction.org/what-culture-health (UCSF, access Nov 6, 2018)

NC Future of Nursing Action Coalition:
Supports this philosophy, which encourages all nurses to embrace a culture of positive health and is taking the lead in creating a healthy North Carolina.

One way is promoting healthy work environments:

Nurses can transform healthcare by assessing and understanding their own individual healthcare needs. The literature demonstrates, promoting healthy work environments are positively associated with nurses’ psychological health and emotional well- being. A healthy nurse work environment is a workplace that is safe, empowering, and satisfying.

A must read article:
The purpose of article is to identify, evaluate, and summarize the major foci of studies about nurse work environments.

Five major impacts/themes related to healthy work environments emerged:
1) Positive Nurses’ outcomes such as psychological health, job satisfaction, and retention
2) Associations between healthy work environments and nurse interpersonal relationships at workplaces, job performance, and productivity
3) Patient care quality
4) Hospital safety
5) Relationships between nurse leadership and healthy work environments.

Bottom Line Message:
Nurses, as frontline patient care providers, are the foundation for patient safety and quality care delivery. Healthier work environments lead to more satisfied nurses which will result in better job performance
and higher quality of patient care.

Article2018_State of the Science Nurse Work Environments in US