Based on the available SOPS surveys from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2025), I selected the hospital survey to take where my average ratings for My Unit/Work Area was 3.14, My Supervisor, Manager, or Clinical Leader was 2.33, Communication was 2.57, Reporting Patient Safety Events was 4, the Patient Safety Rating I gave was 3, and my hospital as a whole was 3. The majority of my estimation is average for the entirety of the hospital and my unit itself. These ratings can be explained by my personal bias in believing that any for-profit corporation will always put profits before work safety. Communication I rated very poorly because communication always seems to be a struggle within my facility between staff and leaders, where most information is delivered late or not at all. This in turn influenced my opinion of clinical leadership because their lack of communication, specifically from those with true decision making power.

According to Tadia et al. (2025), my opinion about communication is generally not shared where average survey results rank this section is above 70% with strong positive attitudes about it however my concern about hospital management is shared in that this is ranked lower on average being less than 50% with positive scores. Tadia et al. (2025), note that the high variation in responses can be attributed to individual interpretation of the meaning of questions or sections and the cultural differences each individual brings when filling out a questionnaire.

The study performed by Zebrak et al. (2022), noted that less than half of respondents rated their personal unit average in safety or below with a common characteristic that these environments had more workplace hazard exposure. While I personally have not been exposed to many environmental hazards, it would be an interesting research point to review within my unit with colleagues about their hazard exposure such as needle sticks or feelings of burnout. Zebrak et al. (2022), found that workplace safety respondents that rated their workplace poorly all experienced at least one symptom of burnout, a feature I likely share in common.

My personal opinion is such that my burnout comes from the poor communication shared between all staff whether physician to nurse or nurse to nurse and sometimes respiratory therapist to nurse. Many process changes happen behind the scenes, and when I only work 3 days a week, I often miss out on many things that will take weeks to reach my ears and now having entered the domain of leadership this frustrates me more. I can attribute this to a lack of a strong and consistent nurse manager as we have had 3 different managers and 2 different interim managers. I can also attribute this to a strong bias and favoritism for different units beyond my own, where staffing rules and expectations don’t seem to apply the same and are even facilitated by upper leadership. If things are to change consistency needs to be implemented, where expectations are the same throughout the facility and each unit is expected to adhere to them fairly. And one very specific quirk that happens within my facility is that bed management meetings happen before the ED starts assigning beds to the ICU where appropriate and frequently creates situations where my unit specifically has to run shorter on nurses because we float out our nurses the most but without the leadership allowing me to take my nurses back causing more triples than necessary. My personal burnout is because as a leader for my unit I am expected to work my nurses harder for the sake of productivity and the bottom line if my unit does not currently have all 36 beds with a patient in it knowing full well that 1-2 hours after that bed management meeting my unit will be full and now I have 4 nurses tripled instead of potentially only 2 or none. This isn’t a problem I can fix no matter what I do, and that may be heinously negative but our world does not promote “wasteful” spending of someone’s potential profits by appropriately staffing, if you want to make money you cut expenses and labor is always the highest expense. That’s not pessimism that’s realism.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (2025). Sops surveys | Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. SOPS Surveys. https://www.ahrq.gov/sops/surveys/index.html

Tadia, V. K., Kotwal, N., & Jalaunia, R. S. (2025). Patient safety culture: Insights from a cross-sectional study among healthcare professionals. Journal of Family Medicine & Primary Care, 14(1), 90–96. https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_904_24

Zebrak, K., Yount, N., Sorra, J., Famolaro, T., Gray, L., Carpenter, D., & Caporaso, A. (2022). Development, Pilot Study, and Psychometric Analysis of the AHRQ Surveys on Patient Safety Culture™ (SOPS®) Workplace Safety Supplemental Items for Hospitals. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH, 19(11). https://doi-org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.3390/ijerph19116815