Leadership Agenda for Change Toward Healthy Work Environments in Acute and Critical Care

Strategies for building healthy work environments

In 2001, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) made a commitment to promote the creation of healthy work environments. The AACN followed through on this commitment with a landmark publication titled AACN Standards for Establishing and Sustaining Healthy Work Environments.¹ Healthy work environments are known to contribute to excellent patient care.^2,3 Organizations with such work environments have structures in place that enable processes such as team-work and collaboration to produce positive outcomes.³ 

Although reports of the changing conditions in the health care work environment have been extensively documented in the general nursing literature,^4,–7 and changes in the work environment are linked to patient safety,⁸ limited formal studies before the AACN national critical care survey^9,10 (hereafter referred to as the National Survey) have been undertaken to provide an empirical assessment of...