Maura Galletta

• PhD Associate Professor
• Associate professor at University of Cagliari

Background Intensive care units (ICUs) are challenging work environments because of the critical condition of patients, and ICU nurses frequently lament low job satisfaction and high staff turnover. Nevertheless, organizational and work characteristics, and the quality of relationships with staff can help to maintain nurses' enthusiasm and increase...

To report a study of the relationship between variables at the group and individual level with nurses' intention to leave their unit. Workplaces are collective environments where workers constantly interact with each other. The quality of working relationship employees develop at the unit-level influences both employee outcomes and unit performance...

The purpose of this study was to examine the variables that are related to person–environment fit in Italian nurses, highlighting the role of supervisor support and organizational support in the relationship between nurses' perceptions of care adequacy, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Therefore, 1240 nurses from three hospitals completed...

Background: Bloodstream infections (BSIs) associated with insertion and maintenance of central venous catheters (CR-BSIs) are the most common causes of health care-associated infections in intensive care units (ICUs). They are responsible for increased length of hospital stay and additional health care costs. Aim: To investigate whether an educa...

Purpose: Burnout is a serious problem for critical care unit workers because they are exposed to chronic psychosocial stressors, including high responsibility, advanced technology and high patient acuity. Recent evidence showed that staff burnout was directly associated with hospital infections, thus affecting quality and safety of care provided....

Objectives: The present cross-sectional web-based survey study aimed to examine the impact of gender and frontline/non-frontline condition on psychological health (depression and peritraumatic distress) of a sample of Italian healthcare workers, and to explore the mediating effects of emotional processing in these relationships. Methods: Emotional...

Background The perception of respect for users' rights is fundamental for organizational well-being in mental health services. This cross-sectional observational study examined the job satisfaction and perception of user rights among nursing staff compared to other health professionals across seven countries in the Mediterranean and Latin American...

Traditionally, literature considers public administration as a bureaucratic institution where managers and employees must adhere to rigid structures and procedures. However, a bureaucratic organizational culture can either support employees (e.g., enabling practices) or conversely exerts control (e.g., coercive practices), thus influencing various...

Background Violence against healthcare workers in psychiatric settings is a concern in the literature. Violence effects for healthcare professionals and organizations include an absence from work due to injury or illness, a decreased job satisfaction, and a lower quality of work. The aim of this study is to identify the consequences of violence on...

Background Students' professional identity is essential to build nursing competence. Cognitive flexibility plays a crucial role in developing professional identity, as well as clinical supervisors and academic teachers through role modeling. This study analyzed the role of internship and theoretical modeling in the link between cognitive flexibilit...

Objectives Analyze the mediating e moderating roles of self-compassion in the relationship between tutor support and both students’ caring efficacy and intention to leave. Methods A cross-sectional study using an online questionnaire was conducted. Results Self-compassion mediates the relationship between tutor support and students’ caring effica...

Introduction: This research describes incorporating the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in training students at an Italian university. It also describes the perception of students on the rights of people with disabilities and the quality of services using the questionnaire the Well-Being...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic represented substantial risks to hospital workers’ physical and mental health. The availability of validated measures on the impact of the pandemic on workplaces is crucial for developing data-driven interventions. The primary purpose of our study was to translate it into Italian and assess factor structure, psychom...

Background The COVID-19 outbreak played a significant psychological impact on nurses, as they coped with intense emotional and cognitive demands, in a context in which the Health System was not prepared to face the emergency. Literature showed that pandemics influenced the nurses' stress and psychosocial health due to poor rest, high work overloads...

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of flexible work arrangements within the Italian public administration. While much of the existing research has focused on the drawbacks of such arrangements, there has been less exploration of their benefits. Cognitive demands related to the structure of work activities, planning of working hours,...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Occupational Fatigue Exhaustion/Recovery (OFER). Methods: A cross-sectional study among 434 healthcare workers was undertaken. The factorial validity of the OFER, was compared using standard confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with explorato...

The measurement of sense of coherence (SOC) has received attention for more than three decades. Despite the extensive use of SOC-13, there is still a long debate regarding its dimensionality structure. Recently, there has been an increasing use of network modeling as a valid alternative to latent-variable modeling. This study proposes an explorator...

Introduction This study investigates the moderating role of supervisor emotional support at the group level on the relationship between emotional exhaustion and work engagement with organizational citizenship behavior-civic virtue (OCB-civic virtue) at the individual level among nurses. Method A cross-sectional study was carried out on 558 nurses...

The current global COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an exceptional crisis with wide-ranging health and economic impacts. To facilitate the containment of the COVID-19 diffusion, national policies on social distancing were immediately adopted in most European countries in March 2020. Among the first measures implemented, working from home has been...

This study aimed to validate the Spanish version of the COVID-19 Student Stress Questionnaire (CSSQ), a 7-item tool assessing COVID-19-related stressors among university students, namely, Relationships and Academic Life, Isolation, and Fear of Contagion. Participants were 331 Spanish university students. Factor analyses sustained the three factor s...

Aim The aim of the present study is to perform a longitudinal Italian validation of the scale and to adapt it to the nursing education contest. Background: Research on emotional labor has shown that the roles played by surface acting and deep acting are still uncertain. To overcome this gap, scholars suggest observing emotional labor through the le...

Background: Shared decision-making implies that patients and healthcare professionals make decisions together about clinical exams, available treatments, choice of options, and the benefit or downside of every choice. Patients involved in the shared decision-making process are more compliant with treatments and have a reduced risk of complications...

Sense of coherence (SOC) is a psycho-social trait formed in childhood or adolescence, allowing individuals to be more resilient to daily life stressors, stay well, and improve their personal health. Although SOC remains stable after the age of thirty, only a few studies investigated its stability in adulthood. The aim was to investigate the develop...

Introduction: Educational material is a key strategy for primary health care promotion. Purpose: To design and validate educational material adapted to the population and aimed to increase knowledge about adherence to the treatment of arterial hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Methodology: Methodological study for the design of educational m...

COVID-19 is a challenge for education systems around the world. This study aimed to evaluate the perceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on nursing students, by assessing their emotions, the level of concern in contracting the virus and their perceived stress. We conducted an observational cross-sectional study. A total of 709 nursing students co...

Background and aim: The World Health Organization has placed eating disorders among the priority mental illnesses for children and adolescents given the risk they imply for their health. Recognizing the risk factors associated with this problem can serve as the basis for the design of timely and effective interventions. The objective of the study...

Literature suggested that COVID-19 patients experienced hospitalization as a physically and psychologically stressful event, with the risk to develop post-traumatic stress symptoms. The study aimed to understand psychological experiences of COVID-19 survivors with severe complications during and after ICU hospitalization, and any relevant health co...

Introduction. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis significantly impacted workplaces across the world. Healthcare workers (HCWs) had to promptly manage unpredictable daily severe critical patients, caring for severely traumatized patients, and frequent witnessing of death of patients. More recently, many studies highlighted how the large number of deaths a...

Background Violence against health care workers in psychiatric settings presents worrying data in the literature. Violence effects for healthcare professionals and organizations are absence from work for injury or illness, decreased job satisfaction and lower quality of work. The aim of the study was to identify the consequences of violence on heal...

Incivility and resilience among nursing students during the clinical practice: the role of supervisor's social support.

Background: In times of global public health emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses stand at the front line, working in close contact with infected individuals. Being actively engaged in fighting against COVID-19 exposes nurses to a high risk of being infected but can also have a serious impact on their mental health, as they are faced wi...

Background: Health care workers (HCWs) are among the professionals at serious risk for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their mental health. In this sense, the next public health challenge globally will be to preserving healthy HCWs during this pandemic. Aim: The present study has the aim of investigating the relationship among concerns, p...

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is asking health care workers (HCWs) to meet extraordinary challenges. In turn, HCWs were experiencing tremendous psycho-social crisis as they have had to deal with unexpected emotional requirements (ERs) arising from caring for suffering and dying patients on a daily basis. In that context, recent studies have h...

Purpose To understand the phenomenon of communication related to knowing diagnosis and prognosis, by exploring the perspectives of patients with advanced cancer and those of their caregivers, physicians and nurses. Methods Drawing upon a multi-perspective design, a total of 27 semi-structured interviews involving four different groups of stakehold...

In the Job Demand-Control-Support (JDCS) model, the combination of job demands, job control, and social support was hypothesized to lead to eight different constellations of job types. According to the model, these constellations are linked to wellbeing/health and learning outcomes. In the last three decades, these constellations of job types have...

Purpose The aim of this prospective study was to assess the behavior of emergency department (ED) nurses with regard to pain and their role in pain management in a real-life clinical setting. Methods A total of 509 consecutive patients were enrolled during a 6-week period. A case-report form was used to collect data on nurses’ approaches to pain,...

Background In cancer care, many clinical contexts still lack a good-quality patient–health professional communication about diagnosis and prognosis. Information transmission enables patients to make informed choices about their own healthcare. Nevertheless, disclosure is still an ethically challenging clinical problem in cancer care. High-quality c...

OBJECTIVES: The main purpose of the current study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the University Stress Scale (USS) among Italian medical students. DESIGN, SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: A cross-sectional observational study based on data from an online crosssectional survey from 11 to 23 December 2018. A total o...

Background Falls in hospital are adverse events with serious consequences for the patient. Fall risk assessment requires easy tools that are suitable for the specific clinical context. This is important to quickly identify preventing measures. The aim of the study is to identify an appropriate scale for assessing fall risk in patients from an emerg...

Background The organizational well-being assessment makes possible to identify risks for health in workers and organizations and to introduce health promotion actions in the workplace. The aim of the study is to analyze the organizational well-being among health professional managers who manage professional groups (e.g., nurses, midwives, physiothe...

Background Violence at work has negative effects on both workers and organizations. Among healthcare workers, nurses are the professionals most at risk, especially those who work in emergency departments. However, literature data are estimated to be the tip of the iceberg. The study aims at analyze violence events that are not reported by professio...

Providing personal care to patients is a significant part of nursing activity, which entails an important emotional labor. According to recent results on emotional labor, our research aims to analyze the role of different emotional regulation strategies (i.e., amplification, suppression, cognitive change and attentional deployment) on self-efficacy...

Background Hospice workers are required to regularly use emotional regulation strategies in an attempt to encourage and sustain terminally ill patients and families. Daily emotional regulation in reaction to constantly watching suffering patients may be intensified among those hospice professionals who have high levels of compassion fatigue. The ma...

Background: Biomechanical overload due to patients' manual handling represents a relevant contributor to chronic low back pain (LBP). Fear of movement (also known as kinesiophobia) and catastrophising may influence the development of chronic complaints and lower performances also in working environments, despite these issues are poorly investigate...

We appreciate the interest raised by our paper on the association between conditions linked to work-related stress and the prolongation of the QT interval on the electrocardiogram [...]

: Background: Work-related stress is a potential cardiovascular risk factor, but the underlying mechanism is not fully explained. The autonomic nervous system control of cardiac function might play a specific role; therefore, monitoring the QT interval in the electrocardiogram can highlight an autonomic imbalance induced by occupational stressors....

Estudio cualitativo sobre el manejo del dolor por parte de enfermería en el paciente con trastorno del espectro autístico en un hospital de la ciudad de Cagliari, Italia Introducción En 2014 destaca cómo el trastorno del espectro autista (TEA) ha aumentado dramáticamente, A menudo se ha afir-mado que las personas con trastorno autista han reducido...

Background and aim of the work: Caring nursing practice is central aspect of quality of services. It is important to assess nurses' caring experience in terms of perceived caring efficacy to make them aware of their outcomes and improve their strategies. The aims of the study was to analyze: (1) the caring efficacy level, (2) differences between t...

Background In the last decade academic stress and its mental health implications amongst university students has become a global topic. The use of valid and theoretically-grounded measures of academic stress in university settings is crucial. The aim of this study was to examine the factorial structure, reliability and measurement invariance of the...

Objective To examine the relationship between sense of coherence (SOC) and physical health–related quality of life in patients with chronic illnesses by focusing on the mediating role of the mental component of quality of life. Design Cross-sectional survey design. Setting Secondary care; three departments of an Italian university hospital. Meth...

Background Providing personal care may be a source of emotional difficulties and negative feelings for students interacting with patients during their first clinical placement. This study was done to describe the role of emotional strategies for first year nursing students providing personal care to patients and the relationship of these strategies...

SCOPO: il dolore è la ragione più comune di accessi in pronto soccorso. La sua gestione viene spesso trascurata ma risulta di fondamentale importanza. Lo scopo di questo studio è quello di analizzare e definire il ruolo del personale infermieristico nella gestione del dolore dei pazienti in emergenza valutando i tempi che intercorrono da quando il...

Providing personal care is one of the most significant activities of nursing care. Literature highlights that nurses experience an ambiguous attitude towards dealing with patients’ body. In particular, while providing personal care is considered as a privileged element that makes nurses feel satisfied and useful, it is also viewed as a source of em...

Caring is the essence of nursing practice. Caring Efficacy scale was developed with the purpose of measuring nurses’ perceived self-efficacy in orienting and maintaining caring relationships with patients. Since any instruments measuring caring self-efficacy have not been developed in Italy, the study aimed at culturally adapting and validating Car...

Aim To elucidate how workgroup commitment and motivation jointly influence nurses’ proactive behaviour. Background The need to offer effective patient care has encouraged healthcare organizations to promote proactive behaviours among nurses. Longitudinal relationships among motivation, commitment, and nurses’ proactivity remain unexplored. Method...

Background and aim: Job burnout has been recognized as a serious occupational hazard among professionals, such as health care professionals. The sense of coherence (SoC) is deemed to be a personal resource capable of reducing the impact of job stressors and, consequently, the experience of job burnout. The purpose of this study was to investigate...

Background Work–family conflict (WFC) is a crucial problem in nursing because of the demanding conditions of the job, such as strenuous shifts, physical and emotional workload, and intense patient involvement. Using a multilevel approach, this study investigated the moderating role of collective affective commitment as a protective resource in the...

In the last decade, patient violence against hospital workers has been recognized as an emerging occupational hazard with negative effects at both individual and organizational levels. The aims of the current study were to examine the media­ting role of emotional exhaustion on the relationship between patient verbal abuse (PVA) and unit affective c...

Burnout has a long tradition of studies in the workplace and recently researchers suggested burnout is also rising among university students. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is considered a valid measure of burnout. However, the student version of the MBI (MBI-SS) has received limited empirical support. The aim of this paper is to analyze the f...

Entrepreneurship is crucial for promoting innovation, creating employment opportunities and generating social and economic wealth in a country’s economy. In order to increase entrepreneurial activity, it is important to investigate entrepreneurial behavior by analyzing the process of businesses creation and the set of factors that favor the develop...

Work-related stress is a known occupational hazard, with a putative role on the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Although several investigations have explored the association in various workplace scenarios, none have focused on the airport flight logistic support personnel, a transportation business of crucial importance, potentially e...

This chapter focuses on the mental health problems and risks that are associated with refugees and migrants. As a result, subsequent to a review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature, the chapter highlights concepts, phenomena, and propositions that could serve as the basis for a theoretical framework of risk factors, mediation, and...

Objective Using a quantitative diary design, the purpose of this paper is to gain insight in the workplace violence phenomenon by examining whether within-person fluctuations in fear of future violence is linked to within-person levels of burnout. In addition, authors investigated whether this relationship was stronger for those low in job control...

Purpose: Healthcare-associated respiratory tract infections are common and markedly affecting the quality of life and mortality, as well as increasing costs for health systems due to prolonged hospitalisation. This study aimed to assess the change in both level and trend of respiratory tract infections after a specific hand hygiene program for int...

Objective: The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between role stress, emotional exhaustion, and a supportive coworker climate among health care workers, by adopting a multilevel perspective. Methods: Aggregated data of 738 health care workers nested within 67 teams of three Italian hospitals were collected. Multilevel regression ana...

Introduction Healthcare associated infections (HAIs) are a cause of high morbidity, disability and reduced quality of life, as well as mortality and rising costs for health systems. Preventing the HAI risk by planning and implementing effective preventive strategies is important to safeguard patient health. Methods The study aimed to evaluate the...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate patients' and caregivers' health needs for a re-orientation program based on principles of health promotion in an Oncology Department from an Italian University Hospital. Method: A Cross-sectional design with qualitative and quantitative approaches was used. Participants included cancer patie...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Clinical learning placements provide a real-world context where nursing students can acquire clinical skills and the attitudes that are the hallmark of the nursing profession. Nonetheless, nursing students often report dissatisfaction with their clinical placements. The aim of this study was to test a model of the relationship...

Background: Burnout is a problem that impacts on the staff management costs and on the patient care quality. Objective: This work aimed to investigate some psychosocial factors related to burnout. Specifically, we explored the sample characteristics for moderate/high emotional exhaustion, cynicism and professional inefficacy, as well as the rela...

Introduction: Supervisor emotional support is a strong determinant of job satisfaction. There is no study examining the effect of supervisor emotional support at the group level on job satisfaction. Multilevel statistical techniques can help disentangle the effects of subjective assessments from those of group factors. Aim: The study's aim was t...

The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work declared, for the next decades, an increase in the proportion of ageing workers. Thus, the health and the safety at work is necessary to ensure an active ageing through the promotion of healthy lifestyles, prevention of diseases and improvement of quality of life. Methods From 09/2014 to 03/2016, a...

Background Nursing students can be exposed to patients with hepatitis A virus (HAV) and can represent a vehicle of transmission both for health personnel, patients and relatives. The aim of this study was to assess the risk of HAV infection in nursing students during their internship. Methods A seroprevalence survey on HAV infection was performed...

Introduction. Health care Workers are exposed to infectious diseases more than the general population. Many of these infections are preventable by vaccination. The objective in this study is to investigate whether, how, and which vaccination underwent Sardinia Health Care Workers (HCWs) and the variability of policies in different Hospital Health M...

Background: Research in Human Resources Management has highlighted that implementing strategies for increasing employees' motivation can be an advantage for organizations because this improves their performance. Objective: Self Determination Theory (SDT) was used to analyze the mediating role of autonomous vs. controlled motivation on the relati...

Voluntary turnover in nursing can lead to nursing shortages that affect both individuals and the entire hospital unit. We investigated the relationship between group- and individual-level variables by examining the association of nurses' job satisfaction and team commitment at the individual level, and nurse-physician collaboration at the group lev...

Background and aim: Health care workers are exposed to several job stressors that can adversely affect their wellbeing. Workplace incivility is a growing organizational concern with the potential to create workplaces harmful to individuals' wellbeing and increase occupational health risks. Based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, the purpo...

Background: Nursing students can be exposed to patients with hepatitis A virus (HAV) and can represent a vehicle of transmission both for health personnel, patients and relatives. Objectives: The aim of this study was to assess the risk of HAV infection in nursing students during their internship. Patients and methods: A seroprevalence survey...

Self-determination theory introduces a multidimensional view of motivation and explains how the different types of motivation can be promoted or hindered. Following Gagné et al. (2014), the purpose of this study was to create an abbreviated version of the Multidimensional Work Motivation Scale (MWMS) and to study the psychometric properties of the...

Self-determination theory introduces a multidimensional view of motivation and explains how the different types of motivation can be promoted or hindered. Following Gagné et al. (2014), the purpose of this study was to create an abbreviated version of the Multidimensional Work Motivation Scale (MWMS) and to study the psychometric properties of the...

This study examined the contributions of perceived organisational support (POS) and organisational commitment (i.e. affective, continuance and normative) to self-competence among nurses. In high-POS environments, workers benefit from socio-emotional resources to improve their skills, while positive forms of commitment (e.g. affective commitment) cr...

Workplace incivility is defined as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target. In this sense, it involves a violation of workplace norms that could damage the quality of working relationships. The aim of this study is to evaluate the factor structure of the adaptation of Straightforward Incivility Scale (SIS; Leiter 201...

Background As health care workers face a wide of psychosocial stressors, they are at high risk of developing burnout syndrome, which in turn may affect hospital outcomes such as the quality and safety of provided care. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the moderating effect of job control on the relationship between workload and b...

In the healthcare setting, Community of Practice (CoP) can be defined as the learning environment where nursing students develop their attitudes toward the nursing profession. Although being part of a CoP is important for nursing students, it can sometimes result in a negative experience where students often perceive a lack of respect. The aim of t...

This study examines multilevel relationships between perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment and voluntary turnover among nurses. We explored the mediation role of affective commitment between POS and turnover behavior at both individual and work-unit levels. This cross-level study involved 945 Italian nurses from 60 work units...

To analyse nursing turnover intention from the unit by using multilevel approach, examining at the individual level, the relationships between job characteristics, job satisfaction and turnover intention, and at the group level the role of leader-member exchange. Research on nursing turnover has given little attention to the effects of multilevel f...

Turnover represents a problematic phenomenon due to both staff management and costs related to the quality of care. Turnover is quite studied in other Countries, but it is still little studied in Italy. The aim of this study was to analyzing psychosocial factors related to intention to leave the hospital, by using theoretical models from literature...