Development of a New Instrument to Measure Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being

Objective

To develop and pilot test a new instrument measuring workplace mental health and well-being among health professionals.

Participants and Methods

A new survey instrument (hereafter referred to as the Augusta Scale) was developed using Qualtrics on the basis of the 5 essentials in the Office of the Surgeon General’s (OSG) framework for workplace mental health and well-being (protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunity for growth). The Augusta Scale contains 22 core questions (on a 1-5 Likert scale) and several demographic characteristic questions. We piloted the Augusta Scale from May 9, 2023, to June 5, 2023, with health professionals serving as preceptors for the Georgia Area Health Education Centers and assessed the instrument’s psychometric properties under the classical test theory paradigm.

Results

The survey’s response rate was 97.8% (583 responses out of 596 surveyed). Physicians comprised the largest health professional group surveyed (307, 52.7%), followed by advanced practice nurses (207, 35.5%), and physician assistants (69, 11.8%). The domain-specific Cronbach’s α ranged from 0.71 (0.67-0.75) to 0.90 (0.87-0.92), whereas the overall scale α was 0.94 (0.93-0.95), suggesting strong reliability. The Ω (high-order) score was 0.91, confirming that all items measured the latent construct. The convergent validity analysis confirmed the inverse relationship between total scale score and perception of burnout.

Conclusion

To our knowledge, the Augusta Scale is the first instrument to assess workplace mental health and well-being using the OSG’s framework. Findings from this pilot test of Georgia health professionals offer evidence to support its validity in certain domains.