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Background: Earlier research calls for an increased focus on organisational factors that affect nurses’ psychosocial working environment. The disciplinary tradition of health promotion is based on the notion that individuals and their surroundings impact on each other and that working environment measures must be appropriate for the setting and not just target individuals. Objective: To examine nurses’ experiences of their psychosocial working environment, and to discuss obstacles and opportunities for a more coherent, settings-based approach. Method: The study has a qualitative design using focus groups. We interviewed the nurses in three wards at a university hospital in Norway. We analysed the data using critical hermeneutic meaning analysis. Results: The findings show that a number of central mechanisms related to psychosocial working environment challenges largely individualise nurses’ challenges in this area. This is revealed through the informants’ experiences of clinical incident reporting, quantitative assessment, HSE measures and managers’ follow-up of personnel. Both individually and in combination, these experiences have the effect of turning the psychosocial working environment into something private and personal as opposed to an organisational challenge that can be resolved as part of a collective effort. Conclusion: When working environment challenges are individualised, nurses must face them alone and must find their own solutions. Consequently, we need ways of working that focus more on the setting. This entails using working methods that take into consideration how the hospital’s organisation affects the psychosocial environment of the nurses.

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