A Systematic Review of nurses’ eating habits on duty for a healthy workplace

Abstract

Background

Nurses are very exposed to not following a healthy diet at work. Their work-shift, stressful situations and wrong snacks during worktime may lead, easily, to overweight and obesity, major risk of disease and reduced productivity. Anyway, the workplace is the right place to start taking care of nurse’s health and eating habits.

Objectives

Aim of this study was to investigate the current evidence from scientific literature about the eating habits of hospital nurses, the modality for the developing of a healthy workplace, identifying barriers and facilitators to healthy eating for nurses on duty.

Materials and methods

A systematic review of the scientific literature of the last 5 years, has been conducted in March 2020 through Medline (PubMed), Scopus, Web of Science (WOS) and Cinahl databases, in accordance with the criteria of PRISMA Statement guideline (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses). The included studies are related to “hospital nurse’s eating habits”. 

Results

21 articles are included. 17 are quantitative study (14 are cross-sectional, 1 cohort, 1 descriptive-correlational and 1 systematic review,) and 4 are qualitative study.

Conclusions

The evidence from this Systematic Review has provided enough information to have a picture on the nurses’ eating habits at work and to begin improving the workplace. Longitudinal studies with reproducible methodologies should be undertaken to achieve stronger results.