[Use of indicators to monitor work-related stress in healthcare]

The approach to work-related stress must move towards an active assessment, able to identify in relatively short periods of time the critical problems in the work organization, which may be responsible in the long term of stress-related diseases with an obvious impact on productivity and efficiency. This assessment can be carried out through an active monitoring of the most important indicators of the working environment assessed. In particular, in our experience, sentinel events, such as absence for sickness or transfer requests, resulted as the most critical factors related to stress within the Operative Units. These results would need additional "subjective" evaluations through surveys, focus groups and semi-structured interviews in order to identify their deep-rooted causes and to develop strategies for management of critical issues and for improvement.