Assessing the quality of the working life of nurse educators in Finland: perceptions of nurse educators and their spouses.

As part of a broader descriptive study of nurse educators' well-being at work in Finland, the quality of working life was assessed by the nurse educators themselves and by their spouses (or another adult living with them). Data were analysed from 477 (68% of 706) educators from 25 institutes throughout Finland and from 409 (58% of 706) spouses. Nurse educators evaluated their working life as being good. Background factors that improved one or several features of working life were: young age, being married, permanent employment in a small institute in the countryside, and highschool education. Lack of freedom to choose the teaching field and tasks at work reduced the quality of working life. Nurse educators estimated that they did an average of 9.6 hours overtime a week; according to their spouses the figure was 12.7 hours. More than moderate amounts of negative stress, derived mainly from work, were reported. Interactions with people at work and the support obtained for their work were generally judged to be good. Participants reported that they were not very satisfied with relationships with college directors, while they were, generally, satisfied with relationships with students. The spouses estimated nurse educators' working life more negatively than did the educators themselves, with the exception of the balance between work and leisure time, which both groups estimated similarly.