Occupational Medicine & Health Affairs
Open Access

Anat Drach Zahavy

Biography

Dr. Anat Drach-Zahavy completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate training in Occupational and Organizational Psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel, completing her Ph.D. in 1997 in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management, in the Technion, the Israeli institute for Technology. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on stress effects on motivation and performance at work settings. Dr. Anat Drach-Zahavy completed both her undergraduate and postgraduate training in Occupational and Organizational Psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel, completing her Ph.D. in 1997 in the department of Industrial Engineering and Management, in the Technion, the Israeli institute for Technology. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on stress effects on motivation and performance at work settings.

Dr. Drach-Zahavy is currently part of the Faculty of Health and Welfare studies at the Haifa University, coordinating the area of Organizational Behavior in the department of Nursing. Her research interests centers around two themes: teamwork and job stress. She is currently involved in several research projects aimed at pursuing healthier workplaces for employees (especially in healthcare settings). This is derived by her concern that health care staff is growingly becoming a high-risk group, which experiences strain, burnout, and diminished health levels.

Her work was supported by several grants including three grants from the Gertner Foundation for Research in Health Services. The first -to fund research on the impact of implementing new nursing roles on nurses' performance, innovativeness, and burnout. The second to fund a research on interdisciplinary teamwork and its effects on the health provider as well as on the quality of care provided for customers; the third concerns medication administration errors and ways to decrease their rates in hospitals.  

Research Interest

As for training, Dr Drach-Zahavy's main focus is on training health providers to cooperate as inter-disciplinary teams as means to facilitate both the health provider's welfare and the provision of quality care for patients. As such, she initiates workshops both for academic as well as for practitioners' audiences.