Health workers experience greater levels of job-related burnout and other mental health disorders than those in other sectors.
Burnout in the healthcare workforce impacts those experiencing it, but is also associated with worse patient outcomes and reduced efficiency of hospitals.
The resulting lost productivity, combined with current recruitment challenges, threatens the already overstretched health workforce, widening the gap between provision of health services and population needs.
This situation has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Effective, affordable and sustainable interventions to improve health professionals’ mental health and wellbeing are essential to interrupt the vicious cycle of high burnout, worsening mental health, lost productivity and unsafe care.
There is substantial research pointing to organisational redesign as a promising approach.
The finding that the causes underlying burnout in nurses and physicians are similar and are rooted within the work environment provides a compelling rationale for prioritising the redesign of hospital environments to address this issue.
The overall objective of Magnet4Europe is to evaluate the effectiveness of organisational redesign of acute care hospitals, guided by the Magnet® blueprint of organisational redesign, on nurses’ and physicians’ wellbeing using a multicomponent and innovative implementation strategy.
Conclusion action
We demonstrated that organisational redesign in acute care hospitals in Europe using the Magnet model of organisation redesign is feasible.
o Comparing the change in organisational design before and after the intervention, using the GAP-analysis tool, we showed that implementation of the magnet model varied from 20% up to 90%, with an average implementation of 50% on the level of the hospital. Main progress was seen on transformation
leadership, exemplary professional practice, adapting new knowledge and innovations, organisational overview and structural empowerment. Less progress has been seen on the level of providing and using empirical outcomes to guide practice.
o Significant improvements in nurse wellbeing (burn-out, intention-to-leave, job satisfaction) and staff perceptions on patient safety and quality of care are seen in hospitals with high improvements in gap items completed (as a proxy for the extent of implementation of the intervention).
o Based on the current findings, we estimate that, when all Magnet4Europe hospitals would reach at least 80% implementation of the Magnet Blueprint, it would lead to significant and major reductions in the percentage of nurses with high burnout, intention-to-leave and job dissatisfaction.
