Understanding the psychiatric work environment and experiences of mental health practitioners leads to better working conditions, relations, and the general treatment and care of patients. A remarkable need does exist to adequately understand practitioners’ experiences as they give treatment and care to occasionally agitated, violent and difficult-to-calm patients. These favourable and unfavourable conditions typically characterize practitioners’ psychiatric environment as they discharge their duties.

Consequently, this study adapted and examined the work characteristics scale (Melchior et al., 2007) and developed a psychiatric work environment scale for mental health practitioners. This study utilized 206 mental health practitioners to conduct an exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using SPSS version 23 and AMOS version 24 to obtain validity and model fit.

Findings revealed three dimensions of the psychiatric work environment scale, i.e., psychological job demand, social support and physical job demand, with 13 items for the new measure. In addition, the scale demonstrated a strong reliability coefficient of .72 Cronbach’s alpha with good validity and an excellent model fit.

The new scale is, therefore, an extensive and excellent measure of the psychiatric work environment and is strongly recommended for use in research related to mental health practitioners and clinical settings.