Healthcare Workforce Wellbeing and Sustainability - Volume I: Organisational Culture, Leadership, and Staff Wellbeing in Healthcare Settings

This Research Topic is led by Louise Ellis, Kate Churruca, Andreas Chatzittofis, Eline Ree, and Siri Wiig, and is part of the Healthcare Workforce Wellbeing and Sustainability series:Volume II: System-Level Governance, Workforce Planning, and Policy SolutionsHealthcare workforces worldwide face sustained pressure from rising demand, post-pandemic recovery, workforce shortages, and persistent moral distress. The conditions inside hospitals, clinics, and community services (leadership behaviour, team norms, psychological safety, perceived organisational support, and the everyday cultural fabric of the unit) shape whether staff thrive, cope, or leave. While the determinants of burnout and disengagement are well documented, much of the existing literature treats wellbeing as an individual trait to be fortified through resilience training, rather than as an emergent property of the organisational system in which clinicians work.Recent advances in complex systems thinking, resilience-in-healthcare scholarship, and the science of perceived organisational support point toward a different framing. Wellbeing is co-produced by leaders, teams, structures, and the conditions of work. Yet the empirical base linking specific organisational levers (leadership style, team climate, staffing models, patient-safety culture, peer support architecture) to measurable workforce wellbeing outcomes remains fragmented across disciplines and settings.This Research Topic invites rigorous, data-informed work that closes that gap. We seek contributions that move beyond individual coping to examine how organisational culture, leadership practice, and the design of the work environment shape staff wellbeing at the unit, facility, and service-line level. We welcome studies that use complexity-informed methods, mixed-methods designs, longitudinal cohorts, ethnographic accounts, and intervention evaluations.o Leadership styles, behaviours, and competencies that protect or erode staff wellbeingo Organisational culture, climate, and psychological safety as determinants of clinician outcomeso Perceived organisational support, recognition, and reward systems in healthcareo Burnout, moral injury, and compassion fatigue: organisational antecedents and unit-level interventionso Patient safety culture and its bidirectional relationship with workforce wellbeingo Team-level resilience practices and the SHARE-aligned organisational adaptations that sustain themo Co-design and participatory approaches to redesigning work environments with staffo Complexity-informed evaluations of organisational interventions targeting wellbeingo Cultural diversity, inclusion, and belonging as wellbeing levers within healthcare teamso Comparative case studies across high-, middle-, and low-income healthcare settingsSubmissions are welcome across all article types, including Original Research, Reviews, Perspectives, and Opinion. Authors are encouraged to share a manuscript summary prior to submission. Topic editors: Louise A Ellis, Andreas Chatzittofis, Kate Churruca, Eline Ree, Siri Wiig Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82159/healthcare-workforce-wellbeing-and-sustainability---volume-i-organisational-culture-leadership-and-staff-wellbeing-in-healthcare-settings