Background:
Improving healthcare professional well-being and reducing burnout requires improving work ecosystems and cultures. Current well-being metrics focus on distal outcomes within individuals (e.g., professional fulfillment or burnout). This study developed and evaluated the performance of an inventory measuring perceptions of modifiable workplace dimensions—termed “influencers”—that shape healthcare professionals’ well-being.
Methods:
A core team developed the Well-Being Influencers Survey for Healthcare (WISH), an inventory designed to measure these systemic, occupational well-being influencers (e.g., leadership support, psychologic safety, working conditions). After content validation and refinement, 223 healthcare professionals from an academic department of anesthesiology completed WISH alongside established well-being measures, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory; the Professional Fulfillment Index; the Perceived Stress Scale; the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System short forms for meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction; as well as standard items of affective commitment (a measure of engagement) and a standard item assessing intention to leave. Factor analysis was used to assess WISH’s internal structure, while correlation and regression analyses assessed its criterion-related validity using the above established measures.
Results:
WISH showed the expected relationships with established well-being measures and outperformed established metrics in predicting affective commitment and intention to leave after adjusting for those measures and/or covariates. Factor analysis indicated that most WISH variance reflects a single common factor, supporting the use of an instrument-level score. Unique variance at the influencer level highlights the added value of examining influencer scores.
Conclusions:
WISH fills a key gap in healthcare professional well-being improvement science by assessing causal factors of well-being and burnout rather than the conditions themselves. This study established initial validity of this unique inventory and further reinforced the relevance of system-level and cultural factors in influencing healthcare professionals’ well-being. WISH is well suited to assist healthcare professional well-being improvement efforts driven by system-improvement mindsets.
Editor’s Perspective
What We Already Know about This Topic
- Burnout is common for healthcare workers
- There is a need to develop tools that measure modifiable factors in the workplace that influence healthcare worker well-being
What This Article Tells Us That Is New
- The investigators developed and validated the Well-Being Influencers Survey for Healthcare (WISH), an inventory that measures systemic factors (e.g., leadership support, psychologic safety, working conditions) in the workplace that affect well-being
- The study provides initial validation and reliability evidence for WISH based on a survey of 223 healthcare professionals from a single large academic department of anesthesiology
- The WISH instrument has the potential to identify system-level and cultural factors influencing healthcare professionals’ well-being that can be the focus of improvement efforts