Grant: Planning Grants

Can nurses really do a good job of looking after patients if they are themselves working in pain or under stress? Poor working environments compromise nurses' ability to provide good patient care and leads to turnover from their employer and profession at the time when there is expected to be a shortage of 60,000 nurses in Canada by 2022. Recently there have been attempts to use engineering methods from manufacturing to improve health care delivery. While these methods have improved efficiency, they have also led to worsening working conditions for nurses - with more heavy lifting and less time to attend to each patient. This is contributing to the nursing shortage and compromising the quality of care in hospitals. The problem is that these improvement efforts have neglected the critical "Human Factor" in professional work. We propose to develop an approach to improving nursing work in ways that improve the speed and quality of patient care delivery. Our multidisciplinary team includes engineers, human factors specialists, psychologists, work sociologists, and nurses. We will develop a new model for improving nursing work that engages the caregivers directly in improving the way they care for patients. We will draw on traditional engineering approaches - but combine them with Human Factors approaches in ways that improve, not degrade, the job of the nurses. We will give nurses the tools to innovate in their own workplaces to improve their situation at work and improve the way they deliver care. This planning grant will fund a two-day workshop necessary for this diverse research team to develop a practical "Canadian" model of innovation. It will also set the stage for field trials to evaluate and further refine this much-needed comprehensive improvement approach that is nurse-centered and patient focused.