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

Abstract

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.

Figure 1

Distribution of item-specific scores across survey items responses (for the core 22 questions of the Augusta Scale). This stacked bar chart shows the overall distribution of responses from strongly disagree to strongly agree for each of the 22 core framework questions from the Augusta Scale.

Figure 2

Path diagram and results for 5-factor confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) for the Augusta Scale (high-order model). This path diagram shows results for the 5-factor confirmatory factor analysis for the Augusta Scale high-order model from individual items, to domains, to the latent factor of workplace well-being. CC, connection and community; MW, mattering at work; OG, opportunity for growth; PH, protection from harm; WH, work-life harmony.