Work-related stress in the healthcare sector: a tailored psychosocial risk assessment approach

Introduction: One among the key aspects of a good psychosocial risks management is using approaches and validated tools tailored to specific critical aspects as size of organization, productive sector and workforce specificities. This can help in enabling practical impact and in developing effective action plans and fitting interventions. The Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority (INAIL) has started a process of contextualization of its methodology for the assessment and management of risks associated to work-related stress (Inail, 2013) in a at-risk sector as the healthcare one. In doing this, it was decided to use integrative measures for specific risks related to this context along with the standard measures used in all other settings. This study aims to present the implementation of the methodology in two healthcare organisations where the tailored assessment tools were administered to employees in the last year. Starting from collected data, this study has the following objectives: 1) to investigate the psychometric properties of the tailored tools, with a particular focus on the new dimensions developed to identify specific risks; 2) to develop and test a new scoring system in which the tailored part could reweighting the risk level generally obtained by the standard measures. Methods: Two large Italian health organizations have been involved in this study. The total sample is composed of 7,163 workers split into 123 work units. Two assessment phases were conducted: 1) a preliminary assessment where a Checklist was filled in for each work unit, as an organisational tool aimed to evaluate the conditions of risk through 3 different dimensions: sentinel events (possible outcomes of work-related stress), work content and work context factors; 2) A self-report questionnaire filled by employees and composed by the Management Standard Indicator tool and new additional measures corresponding to specific risks as emerged from the Literature and a previous pilot study (Balducci, 2016). Since all the standard measures and indicators have had a standardised system to obtain the risk level by the assessment, we decided to define and test proper criteria for the development of a new scoring system where the tailored part could contribute in reweighting the risk level emerged by the standard measures scoring system. This also allows to highlight the unique contribution of the tailored measures in identifying the risks of work stress in this context. Results and Discussion: Findings show good quality of the tailored assessment measures in the healthcare sector and interesting relationship between the new and standard measures included in the risk assessment. The new scoring system will be presented in detail including comparison among the risk obtained by the standard measures and the unique contribution of the new tailored one. As output of this study a full tailored methodological proposal to the healthcare sectors will be offered to organisations.