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Improve Your Practice Environment
 The goal of this action guide is to help nurses create and maintain quality practice environments that maximize outcomes for clients, nurses, teams, organizations and systems. Find out what defines a quality practice environment, how to assess your own practice environment, how to initiate change, and read examples of simple solutions that can make a measurable difference.
This guide was developed under the leadership of the Canadian Nurses Association with the support of nurses across Canada and other health-care partners.
Much of the content of this action guide has been adapted from Making a Measurable Difference: Evaluating Quality of Work Life Interventions by Graham S. Lowe.
Key Messages
For nurses
Canada’s nurses have taken the lead in defining quality of work-life indicators since 2000. Healthy nurses who work in healthy workplaces provide better, safer patient care.
Nurses are well positioned to influence improvements in practice environments. In all settings and roles, nurses must contribute to processes that create and maintain quality practice environments.
For health-care leaders
There is an urgent need for the Canadian health-care system to do more to retain its health human resources in healthy and supportive work environments. Canada’s health-care system depends on healthy health-care workplaces and healthy health-care providers.
Quality practice environments maximize outcomes for clients, providers, organizations and systems.
The Quality Worklife – Quality Healthcare Collaborative (QWQHC) is a national coalition of health-system leaders working together to develop and promote a coordinated action strategy to improve the health of health-care workplaces in order to improve patient care. |
Primary Care Toolkit
