Staff Well-being in Healthcare Settings: Organizational, Psychosocial, and Patient Care Perspectives

Staff well-being in healthcare settings has emerged as a critical global concern. Frontline professionals, including nurses, physicians, and other direct care providers, routinely operate under conditions of high workload, emotional demands, and significant resource constraints, giving rise to a range of interconnected psychosocial challenges: stress, burnout, moral distress, and reduced job satisfaction. These pressures are further compounded by the inherent demands of healthcare work itself, including repeated exposure to suffering, loss, and death, ethically charged situations, and, at times, adverse interpersonal dynamics that can even escalate into workplace violence. Rarely isolated, these experiences interact and reinforce one another in ways that threaten both individual and collective well-being. Understanding these dynamics in their full complexity is essential to addressing the well-being of those who sustain our healthcare systems.Neither new nor confined to crisis periods such as the COVID-19 pandemic, these challenges are best understood as structural features of healthcare environments whose consequences extend across every level, from the individual worker to teams, organizations, and the patients they serve. When left unaddressed, they erode workplace effectiveness, undermine the quality and safety of care, and threaten the long-term sustainability of healthcare systems. Increasingly, they are understood not as individual or interpersonal failures, but as expressions of deeper systemic and organizational conditions, shaped by culture, leadership, and working structures, that require comprehensive and integrated responses.This Research Topic aims to advance a comprehensive understanding of staff well-being in healthcare settings, examining its individual, relational, and organizational determinants, with particular attention to its consequences for psychosocial health, workplace functioning, and patient care. Despite increasing recognition, existing approaches remain uneven, often privileging individual-level explanations while overlooking key organizational drivers such as leadership, culture, team dynamics, and environmental working conditions. To address these gaps, this Research Topic also seeks to integrate recent advances in organizational psychology, public health, and health services research to generate robust, evidence-based insights into risk and protective factors, reporting behaviors, and organizational responses to violence. Emphasis will be placed on prevention and management strategies, including organizational interventions, leadership practices, training programs, and policy frameworks that foster safe and supportive work environments. By bridging theory and practice, the Topic aims to inform sustainable organizational change and improve healthcare workers’ well-being, workplace effectiveness, and the quality and safety of care.We welcome contributions examining staff well-being and workplace violence in healthcare settings through organizational and psychosocial perspectives. Relevant themes include: • individual, relational, and organizational determinants • team dynamics, communication, and interprofessional relationships • risk and protective factors • consequences for staff well-being, workplace effectiveness, and patient safety, including burnout, moral distress, and ethical challenges • stigma/normalization of violence and its consequences • resilience, coping strategies, and support systems for healthcare workers • well-being, psychological safety, and mental health in healthcare organizations • the role of policies and organizational practices in prevention and managementAttention is also given to the various forms of workplace violence (e.g., physical, psychological, sexual, horizontal violence, and mobbing) and their impact on the nursing workforce, including exposure patterns, professional and psychological consequences, and implications for retention and quality of care. Research focusing on nurses and the nursing workforce is especially encouraged, including studies addressing their psychosocial health, working conditions, exposure to incidents, moral and emotional burden, professional retention, and contribution to safe and high-quality care.We encourage submissions addressing prevention and management strategies, including organizational interventions, training programs, and policy initiatives, as well as studies exploring the broader conditions shaping staff well-being and psychosocial health in healthcare organizations.Original research, reviews, theoretical, conceptual, or methodological papers, perspectives, reports, and case studies are welcome. Topic editors: Giuliano Anastasi, Roberto Latina, ISABELLE ESTHER BAUER Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79784/staff-well-being-in-healthcare-settings-organizational-psychosocial-and-patient-care-perspectives