Luppo Kuillman

Chapter 4 98 review, Godin and Kok (1996) describe 56 studies reporting that “planned behavior” has a statistically significant correlation with both “attitude” ( r = .22 to .77) and “perceived behavioral control” ( r = .14 to .85). These correlations were found among a wide variety of study subjects and domains, including a) addiction (e.g., quitting smoking); b) exercising behavior (e.g., initiating sport activities for health benefits); c) oral hygiene behavior (e.g., preventing dental decay by brushing frequently); and d) health-risk prevention behavior (e.g., condom use to prevent HIV) (Godin & Kok, 1996). The outcomes of the present study contribute to the literature on whistleblowing. We developed and tested a context-specific measure of whistleblowing explicitly for individual healthcare providers (e.g., PAs andNPs). These effortswere prompted largely by a recently published narrative review by Blenkinsopp and colleagues (2019), which identifies 58 studies addressing the phenomenon of whistleblowing in healthcare at least to some extent (Blenkinsopp et al., 2019), with the greatest share of these studies focusing exclusively on nursing populations. This is problematic, as the findings for nurses may not generalize to other health professions, given that nurses usually work in teams, in addition to having their own professional culture, interactions, norms, and values. Moreover, their relatively small range of decision authority may hamper whistleblowing behavior. The current study investigates whistleblowing behavior among PAs and NPs, whose autonomous, full-practice authority should logically make them more likely to engage in whistleblowing (De Bruijn-Geraets et al., 2018). Our findings show that, even in light of such professional authority, these practitioners still require a higher-than-average level of perceived behavioral control in order to translate their motivation to act morally into actual behavior. Strengths and limitations One strength of this study is that it is based on a representative sample in terms of gender and age that reflects the demographics of both the NP and PA workforces in the Netherlands (Laurant, van de Camp, Boerboom, & Wijers, 2014). For this reason, the results can be generalized to a certain degree. The findings obtained among these autonomous PAs and NPs could conceivably also be applied to professionals with comparable independent treatment relationships (e.g., medical doctors, physical therapists, speech therapists, or dental hygienists).