The nursing practice environment is defined as the organizational characteristics of a work setting that facilitate or constrain professional nursing practice. An example of this would be the nature of the professional relationship between a nurse and physician and how this relationship affects a nurse's ability to provide care for patients. 

The Practice Environment Scale (PES) is meant to capture a nurse's perception of their nursing practice environment. There are 29 different questions and a nurse responds based on a weighted scale which ranges from strong agreement to strong disagreement to the particular question.