Relationship Between Perceived Organizational Support, Work Well-Being, and Medical Narrative Ability Among Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Multicenter Study

Aims: The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between nurses’ perceived organizational support, work well-being, and medical narrative ability.

Background: With the proposed bio-psycho-social medical model, nurses’ medical narrative ability is closely related to patients’ health problems and quality of life. Nurses’ perceived organizational support and work well-being can improve nurses’ empathy and reflection ability to a certain extent and promote patients’ rehabilitation. However, the relationship between nurses’ perceived organizational support, work well-being, and medical narrative ability is unclear.

Methods: A total of 1831 nurses from 8 hospitals in China were surveyed using an online questionnaire that included nurses’ sociodemographic, perceived organizational support, work well-being, and medical narrative ability. IBM SPSS 27.0 was used for Pearson’s correlation analysis, one-way ANOVA, t-test, and mediation effect analysis using Model 4 in PROCESS (5000 resamples).

Results: The total mean score of perceived organizational support (46.68 ± 11.00), work well-being (53.09 ± 10.81), and medical narrative ability (154.48 ± 22.93) among nurses was found to be moderate. The relationship between perceived organizational support, work well-being, and medical narrative ability was significant, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.348 to 0.685 (p < 0.01). The relationship between perceived organizational support and medical narrative ability is partially mediated by work well-being. The intermediate effect accounted for 52.36% of the total effect.

Conclusion: This study found that nurses’ work well-being mediated the relationship between perceived organizational support and medical narrative ability.

Implications for Nursing Management: This study evaluated nurses’ medical narrative ability and explored the relationship between nurses’ perceived organizational support, work well-being, and medical narrative ability. The results of this study can help nursing managers and educators to take appropriate measures to intervene nurses’ perceived organizational support and work well-being, so as to improve nurses’ medical narrative ability and optimize nursing quality.