Work engagement of psychiatric nurses: a scoping review protocol

Psychiatric nurses face various stressors related to nurse-patient relationships, workplace interpersonal relationships and organisational problems, and are required to perform excellent work under stressful situations. As work engagement (a counterconcept of burnout) is a key factor that improves the performance of nurses, clarifying how to improve work engagement is an essential topic among researchers. Although some knowledge has been accumulated on the subject, no reviews have been conducted on the work engagement of psychiatric nurses. To fill the gap, this scoping review will examine the status of research activity on the work engagement of psychiatric nurses and identify related factors, consequently mapping the available research in this area.

The review will be conducted according to established scoping review methodological guidelines. The inclusion criteria will be based on nurses (participants), work engagement (concept), and psychiatric settings (context) without language or date restrictions. Regardless of the methodology or study design, research related to the work engagement of psychiatric nurses will be included. A systematic search will be conducted for MEDLINE, CINAHL and PsycINFO, with the searches being arranged by an information specialist through discussion. The first author will screen all potentially relevant publications, and the second author will independently screen a random sample comprising 10% of the manuscripts. Any disagreement will be resolved by a review team. Data will be extracted using a standardised extraction form, subsequently summarised through quantitative (frequencies) and qualitative analyses (narrative synthesis), and reported in the results of the review.

As the data will be collected from existing literature, ethical approval is not required. The findings will be disseminated through conference presentations and publication in a peer-reviewed journal. They are expected to help researchers enhance psychiatric nurses' work engagement, consequently contributing to improving their performance.