Assessing Nursing Home Workplace Conditions

The Workplace Integrated Safety and Health (WISH) assessment tool can help nursing homes understand how they perform when it comes to best practices for protecting and promoting worker health, safety, and well-being, advised authors of a validation study published online in BMJ Open. 

“Measuring the domains of the WISH can help organizations and researchers in their prioritization and decision-making to improve workplace conditions, using resources to affect the areas with the worst performance,” wrote María Andrée López Gómez, MPH, PhD, of Harvard University and coauthors. “Using the WISH tool at baseline with follow-up assessments has the potential to provide organizations a way to identify improvements or setbacks in the organization in relation to recommended best practices.” 

Researchers tested the instrument in a sample of nursing homes in Ohio, California, and Massachusetts certified by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Some 569 directors of nursing participated in a survey used for the study. 

Five of the scale’s six constructs (leadership commitment; participation; policies, programs, and practices; comprehensive and collaborative strategies; and adherence) were unidimensional, according to the study. The tool’s overall measure and construct reliability were acceptable to good. 

The scale appeared most informative for nursing homes with low-level working conditions supporting safety, health, and well-being, analyses suggested. 

“The WISH tool may also complement surveys directed to workers,” researchers wrote, “which can inform managers and researchers alike of any discordances between organizational policies, practices, and programs and workers’ perceptions of these.” 

Reference: 

López Gómez MA, Gundersen DA, Boden LI, et al. Validation of the Workplace Integrated Safety and Health (WISH) assessment in a sample of nursing homes using Item Response Theory (IRT) methods. BMJ Open. 2021;11(6):e045656. Published 2021 Jun 18. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2020-045656