Two main obstacles in researching workplace practices and emotional wellbeing for health professions are:
1. Lack of Validated, Context-Specific Instruments:Existing assessment tools for measuring emotional labor, resilience, and workplace practices in healthcare settings often lack adequate psychometric validation or are not specifically designed for the unique challenges faced by healthcare professionals. Many instruments are borrowed from other fields and fail to capture the complexity of healthcare work environments, including exposure to violence, emotional demands of patient care, and team dynamics.
2. Time-Intensive and Fragmented Assessment:Traditional research approaches require lengthy questionnaires that are burdensome for already overworked healthcare professionals. Additionally, different aspects of workplace wellbeing—such as emotional intelligence, resilience, workplace violence exposure, and team cohesion—are typically measured using separate, uncoordinated instruments, making comprehensive assessment impractical.

To effectively assess the emotional and professional wellbeing of healthcare workers, researchers need validated, efficient tools that: capture the unique demands of healthcare work, are practical for busy professionals, enable team-level assessment and are culturally validated.

Solution
To address these obstacles and more effectively research workplace practices in health professions, the team is developing a comprehensive, validated platform for creating and deploying questionnaires tailored to healthcare workplace research.

The Healthcare Workplace Emotion & Resilience Assessment Platform (HEWRAP) provides:

> Validated, Healthcare-Specific Instruments: Drawing on decades of research in emotion management, workplace violence, resilience, and care quality, the platform will offer rigorously validated questionnaires specifically designed for healthcare professionals.

> Modular Assessment Design: Researchers can select from validated modules covering emotional labor, personal and team resilience, workplace violence exposure, professional growth, interprofessional collaboration, and patient care quality.

> Efficient Online Delivery: A user-friendly digital platform will enable healthcare professionals to complete assessments remotely during breaks or between shifts, reducing participation barriers.

Workplace Violence Assessment Questionnaire
Prof. Itzhaki and her research team have developed validated questionnaires employing scenario-based vignettes to examine attitudes toward workplace violence against healthcare staff, deployed with over 1,350 participants from the general public in Israel.  The validated instrument measures past exposure to violence and attitudes that justify violence, which mediates between witnessing violence and intention to behave violently.

Emotional Labor in Complex Care Questionnaire
This validated scenario-based Emotional Work Questionnaire examines how nursing students manage emotional demands in challenging patient interactions, grounded in Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor.  The study assessed 376 nursing students using scenarios depicting encounters with e-patients presenting reliable or unreliable medical information from the internet. The questionnaire measures experienced and expected emotions, the discrepancy between them, and emotional work techniques—specifically surface acting versus deep acting—with strong psychometric properties.

Researchers interested in using any of the validated instrument should contact Prof. Itzhaki at itzhakim@tauex.tau.ac.il