Empowered to Stay Active: Psychological Empowerment, Retirement Timing, and Later Life Work.

Motivating older employees both to prolong their working lives and to stay active even after retirement has become increasingly important due to rising old-age dependency ratios. Later life work-including both paid work and volunteering-has thus become an important topic for scholars and practitioners. We aim to extend research on later life work by hypothesizing that psychological empowerment at work increases not only desired and actual retirement ages but also levels of later life work. Second, we test differential effects of psychological empowerment on later life work, expecting it to be more strongly related to paid work after retirement (i.e., bridge employment) than to volunteering. Third, we suggest that the relationship between psychological empowerment and bridge employment depends on the employees' level of physical limitations. We used data from a longitudinal panel study in Germany in which structured telephone interviews were conducted. A sample of older individuals who had retired between two waves of measurement was drawn (time lag: three years; n = 210). The results of a path analysis support the postulated mediation. Furthermore, as expected, psychological empowerment more accurately predicted bridge employment than volunteering, and physical limitations moderated the relationship between psychological empowerment and bridge employment. Lastly, additional analyses on the individual empowerment facets revealed that only the competence facet played a significant role in the proposed hypotheses. Overall, our findings suggest that psychological empowerment may help to increase older employees' motivation to delay retirement and to stay active even after retirement.

Long-term effects of an e-learning course on patient safety: A controlled longitudinal study with medical students.

BACKGROUND: To improve patient safety, educational interventions on all system levels, including medical school are necessary. Sound theoretical knowledge on elements influencing patient safety (such as error management or team work) is the basis for behavioral changes of health care professionals. METHODS: A controlled, quasi-experimental study with repeated measures was deployed. The intervention group participated in a mandatory e-learning course on patient safety (ELPAS) between October 2016 and December 2016. The control group did not receive any didactic session on patient safety. In both groups we measured technical knowledge and attitudes towards patient safety before the intervention (T0), directly after the intervention (T1) and one year after the intervention (T2). Participants were 309 third-year medical students in the intervention group and 154 first- and second-year medical students in the control group. RESULTS: Technical knowledge in the intervention group (but not the control group) improved significantly after the intervention and remained high after one year (F(2, 84) = 13.506, p < .001, η2 = .243). Students of the intervention group felt better prepared for safe patient practice, even one year after the intervention F(2, 85) = 6.743, p < .002, η2 = .137). There was no sustainable significant effect on attitudes towards patient safety. CONCLUSION: This study shows, that eLearning interventions can produce significant long-term effects on patient safety knowledge, however, the study did not show long-term effects on attitudes towards patient safety. Our study implies two potential developments for future research: e-learning might be used in combination with face-to-face sessions, or more intensive (in terms of frequency and duration) e-learning sessions may be needed to achieve lasting changes in attitude.