Work environment assessment instruments used in nursing

The aim was to identify and characterize instruments for assessing the work environment of nurses. The sources of information were articles in six electronic databases. Prior to the search, a clinical question was constructed: "Which instruments are suitable for assessing the work environment of hospital nurses?" The query words were practice/work environment, nursing, scale. The search, using Boolean operators and limited to the period of 2010-2020, was performed from May to June 2020. The inclusion criteria were: empirical study, description of methods used, and an available English full text. From a total of 1,212 identified articles, 57 were selected for the final analysis. The studies used as many as 23 instruments. The most common ones were the Practice Environment Scale - Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI) or the variants Practice Environment Scale and Nursing Work Index, followed by Brisbane Practice Environment Measure and Revised Professional Practice Environment. The work environment was assessed along with other variables such as burnout syndrome or workload. Among the numerous instruments for monitoring the work environment, the PES-NWI was most commonly used. The instrument has also been translated into the Czech language. The study results suggest that the quality of the work environment is associated, for example, with nurses' job satisfaction or burnout syndrome, illustrating the importance of this issue in the Czech setting.