Read about Healthy Nurse, Healthy Nation, a nationwide movement to connect and engage nurses and organizations to take positive action in physical activity, sleep, nutrition, quality of life, and safety.
Healthy Work Environment
Nurses have the potential to lead the way in improving health and health care for all, but in order to realize that potential they must operate in an environment that is safe, empowering, and satisfying.
Just as health care workers have a duty of care to their patients, employers have a fundamental duty of care to their employees – to create a healthy work environment for them.
It isn’t just about making sure health care settings are free from potential threats to a practitioner’s physical welfare – the World Health Organization (WHO) defines a healthy environment as a place of “physical, mental, and social well-being,” supporting optimal health and safety.
The Nurses Bill Of Rights
The American Nurses Association (ANA) believes that in order to be sure that a work environment fulfills these criteria, and allows nurses to perform to the best of their ability, there are certain fundamentals which have to be in place.
To that end, we created the Nurses’ Bill Of Rights, a document setting forth seven basic principles concerning workplace expectations and environments that we believe every nurse has a fundamental right to see fulfilled.
Drawing from policy statements, standards of practice documents, and The Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, the document has been created with the interests of both nurses and those they care for in mind.
While not legally binding, we strongly believe that it establishes a framework upon which all organizations that employ nurses should build their policies and procedures, and gives nurses a template to help them understand their basic rights in the workplace:
Practical ways of putting the Nurses Bill Of Rights into action
Many of the challenges nurses face in their professional lives come under the scope of a healthy work environment, and ANA is actively involved in all of them, advocating for positive change as an organization, while arming individual nurses with the resources they need to take action for themselves.
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Sue Johnson
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