Introduction to the special issue creating healthy work environments

Healthcare professionals are at risk for compassion fatigue and burnout from increased workload and less time with patients (Labrague et al., 2017). The COVID-19 pandemic has further stressed providers who must deal with allocation of scarce resources, increased health risk to self and family, powerlessness, moral distress, shared family grief, secondary trauma, and mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion (Occupational of Health and Safety, 2020). The confluence of pre-existing burnout in the profession and post-traumatic stress due to COVID-19 challenges has led to tremendous needs for personal and professional resources, as well as a significant public health problem for our health care system. Moreover, healthcare professionals and professions being stretched beyond capacity are not limited to clinical settings. Academic settings face similar challenges with financial constraints leading to fewer support services for faculty and students when needed most.

These challenges have a profound impact on nurses' well-being and healthcare, including the quality of patient care and efficiency (National Academy of Medicine, 2020). When nurses suffer, patients, families, and organizations suffer as well. Alternatively, investing in nurses' well-being positively impacts job satisfaction, patient and student experiences, patient outcomes, and healthcare models' sustainability.

This special issue, Creating Healthy Work Environments, was envisioned and put in motion years ago;, however, the pandemic has made the content even more timely and essential. The nine scholarly articles in this issue address how nurses and healthcare professionals in both clinical and academic settings can better care for themselves, support one another, and simultaneously facilitate the transformation of workplace cultures. They do not merely report ideas from existing workplace environments for adapting approaches to suit the existing paradigm; rather, these articles provide detailed, theoretically-grounded descriptions of how organizations and systems should organize to create healthy-healing environments. This issue provides timely and relevant resources on “how to” create more compassionate, caring, and healthy environments for nurses, students, and educators alike.