Background Improving the resiliency of healthcare workers is a national imperative, driven in part by healthcare workers having minimal exposure to the skills and culture to achieve work–life balance (WLB). Regardless of current policies, healthcare workers feel compelled to work more and take less time to recover from work. Satisfaction with WLB has been measured, as has work–life conflict, but how frequently healthcare workers engage in specific WLB behaviours is rarely assessed. Measurement of behaviours may have advantages over measurement of perceptions; behaviours more accurately reflect WLB and can be targeted by leaders for improvement. Objectives To describe a novel survey scale for evaluating work–life climate based on specific behavioural frequencies in healthcare workers. To evaluate the scale’s psychometric properties and provide benchmarking data from a large healthcare system. To investigate associations between work–life climate, teamwork climate and safety climate. Methods Cross-sectional survey study of US healthcare workers within a large healthcare system. Results 7923 of 9199 eligible healthcare workers across 325 work settings within 16 hospitals completed the survey in 2009 (86% response rate). The overall work–life climate scale internal consistency was Cronbach α=0.790. t-Tests of top versus bottom quartile work settings revealed that positive work–life climate was associated with better teamwork climate, safety climate and increased participation in safety leadership WalkRounds with feedback (p<0.001). Univariate analysis of variance demonstrated differences that varied significantly in WLB between healthcare worker role, hospitals and work setting. Conclusions The work–life climate scale exhibits strong psychometric properties, elicits results that vary widely by work setting, discriminates between positive and negative workplace norms, and aligns well with other culture constructs that have been found to correlate with clinical outcomes.

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This study investigated the impact of providing low-dose inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) at school or at home to asthmatic inner city children over a 14-week period, compared with the existing community standard. Eight elementary schools in the Dallas Independent School District with a high incidence of asthma located in predominantly urban African-American communities were randomly assigned to one of four groups. The treatment arms were school-based delivery of inhaled steroids, home-based delivery of inhaled steroids, and home-based delivery of inhaled steroids with school-based asthma education, and the control group was no change in current therapy. Fifty students were objectively diagnosed with mild, persistent asthma and participated in the study. Students in the treatment arms received beclomethasone (42 mcg/puff) 4 puffs, twice a day, either at school or at home. Students in the control, "community standard of care" group received no additional medical intervention. Higher peak flows for the treatment groups were seen in the first week and maintained throughout the study (P = .047). By week 5 significant differences were found in frequency of bronchodilator use (P = .025), episodes of nocturnal awakening with asthma symptoms (P = .022), and visits to the primary health care provider (P = .022). Treatment groups rated their asthma as "better than the week before" more frequently than the control group (P = .001). Delivering ICS in school is associated with improved asthma control than when anti-inflammatory medication was delivered to children with asthma in a home-based setting, and both are superior when compared with a control, "community standard of care" group in which no additional medical intervention occurred.