Hastanelerde İş Sağlığı ve Güvenliğinin Sağlanmasında Personel Güçlendirmenin Etkisi: Hemşireler Üzerinde Bir Çalışma

Abstract

YILDIZ, Ahmet. Impact of Empowerment on Ensuring of Occupational Health and Safety in Hospitals: A Study on Nurses, Doctoral Thesis, Ankara, 2017. All over the world, occupational health and safety issue is seen as a major problem. Health profession, especially nursing profession is one of the riskiest professions in occupational groups in terms of exposure to occupational risks and hazards due to work environment and organizational factors. It is necessary to ensure workplace safety for employees to effective and efficient working. Employee empowerment that express practices and conditions which increase employee motivation, satisfaction, confidence level and professional knowledge and enable development can be an important tool in ensuring the occupational health and safety. The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of empowerment on ensuring of occupational health and safety in hospitals. The study was carried out on total 377 nurses working in 2 public hospitals and 3 private hospitals in Batman. Survey form consisting of “Psychological Empowerment Instrument”, “Conditions of Work Effectiveness Questionnaire II”, “Universal Precautions Compliance Scale”, “Fulfill the Obligations Related to Occupational Health and Safety Scale”, “23-item set of questions to determine occupational risks and hazards and 21 questions related to taken measures to ensure occupational health and safety and the nurses of the occupational and demographic characteristics was used as the tool for data collection. In the study, psychological and structural empowerment are identified as independent variables while universal precautions compliance, fulfilling the obligations related to occupational health and safety and exposing to occupational risks and hazards are identified as dependent variables. Impact of empowerment on behaviors related to occupational health and safety evaluated by path analysis while impact of empowerment on exposing to occupational risks and hazards evaluated by logistic regression analysis. In the study, it has been determined that both psychological and structural empowerment of levels of nurses effect to universal precautions compliance and fulfilling the obligations related to occupational health and safety. It was determined that explanation degree of together to the psychological and structural empowerment for universal precautions compliance was 52%, while fulfilling the obligations related to occupational health and safety was 42%. In the study also it was determined that the empowerment effect on experience psychological discomfort, needle stick injury and exposure to physical violence and it was determined that the higher the level of empowerment of nurses less exposed to these occupational risks and hazards. As a result, it was seen that empowerment could be a valuable tool in ensuring the occupational health and safety and it were given suggestions about employee empowerment.