Improving Psychosocial Working Environment in Tertiary Care Hospital

Background: There is an enormous need to improve the psychosocial working environment in hospitals for the better organizational outcome. Deranged Working environment in a hospital is one of the major factors which decrease the productivity of employees and can cause major discrepancies amongst the healthcare workers. With this background, a study was carried out in a tertiary care hospital in Bangalore for a period of six months, from February 2019 to July 2019 which was cross sectional and descriptive in nature. The study aimed to assess factors which affect psychosocial work environment in a hospital and recommend strategies to improve the same. The data collection was carried out through a structured questionnaire which contained seven parameters i.e., job demand, workload, work organization, empowerment, health and well being, social support, interpersonal relations and professional and personal development. A pilot study was carried out to check the reliability of the questionnaire for 20 samples. Pie charts and bar diagrams were used to interpret the results. Furthermore, through the obtained results, key problem areas were identified and focus group discussions were conducted to analyze the reasons for compromised psychosocial status. The results demonstrated the major problems faced by the employees, which were, dealing with nervousness under pressure, high workload, reduced freedom at work, emotionally demanding work-life etc. It was observed that, 55% of administrative staffs have more stress levels in comparison with paramedics having 47%, followed by nurses and doctors with 42% and 36% respectively. This gives a different perspective to the study in comparison with the previous studies that focused only on doctors and nurses. Secondly, by analyzing the key problematic areas it was observed that there were major issues related to workload, social support, and health and well being. Based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the hospital needs to improve on resolving the workload issues, providing empowerment at work, developing strategies to promote health and well-being, increasing social support and developing polices for absence management and mental health promotion.