Safety Workaround of Registered Nurses in Malaysian Public Hospitals: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Safety workarounds stay a crucial concern for employers, significantly within the healthcare industry wherever hospital nurses' safety has deteriorated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This pilot study used descriptive and correlational analyses to explore and analyse the reliability of the constructs of communication barriers, work engagement, and burnout on safety workarounds, and also their relationship. This study was conducted with 30 registered nurses in public hospitals in the State of Perak, Malaysia. The results showed that all scales to measure burnout, work engagement, communication barriers, and safety workaround had moderate to excellent feasibility and had sufficient test-retest reliability. The results also indicate that all two independent factors, namely burnout and communication barrier, were shown to be negatively and significantly correlated with safety workaround, whereas work engagement was found to be positively and significantly correlated with safety workaround. This study is anticipated to fill a spot within the literature as a result of there hasn't been a lot of analysis on nurses' safety workarounds within the Malaysian setting. These results may contribute to a stronger understanding of the constructs of communication barriers, work engagement, and burnout and how to deal with safety workaround of registered nurses in Malaysian public hospitals.