Healthcare Employees’ Burnout, Job Stress, Health, And Workplace Social Networks: Addressing The Quadruple Aim

Abstract

With the goal of optimizing its performance, the health care field has widely accepted the Triple Aim, which called on health care organizations to provide high quality, accessible care by attending to 1) population health, 2) patients' experience of care, and 3) per capita cost for healthcare. Expanding from a Triple to Quadruple Aim by including a fourth aim targeted at improving the health and wellbeing of healthcare employees holds great potential for being an effective approach to improve the performance of health care. This dissertation is focused on increasing the scientific understanding about the fourth aim (i.e., healthcare providers' health and wellbeing) of the Quadruple Aim through examining the associations between job stress, workplace social networks, and employees' burnout and physical health through the framework of social network theory. There are six chapters in this dissertation, including: (a) an introduction chapter into the Triple to Quadruple Aim Framework, (b) literature review chapter that introduces social network theory as a theoretical foundation to examine the influence of workplace interpersonal relationship on employees' health and wellbeing, (c) systematic review of empirical articles to examine how workplace social networks are associated with workplace health outcomes, (d) methodology chapter describing the original quantitative research study, (e) original research reporting the results of the quantitative study that examined how workplace social networks changed the association between employees' job stress and employee health outcomes (i.e., burnout, and physical health), and (f) discussion chapter that appraised the study's contributions to science, applied the results to future research recommendations to advance the national movements, and offered practice recommendations for healthcare organizations.