As the primary care givers to patients, it is important that the nursing staff have opportunities to care for and restore themselves so that they can continue to provide excellent patient care. The culture of nursing traditionally has been to put the patient before self; however, this does not mean that nursing self-care is not important. In fact, nurses actually have a professional obligation to care for themselves. According to the ANA Code of Ethics (2015), Provision 5: “The nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to promote health and safety, preserve wholeness of character and integrity, maintain competence, and continue personal and professional growth” (p.19).
The idea of nursing self-care is also congruent with Jean Watson’s Theory of Human Caring. Several of the Caritas Processes and Caritas Consciousness Behaviors identified by the theory are supportive of nursing self-care and restorative practices (Watson Caring Science Institute, 2010; Watson Caring Science Institute, 2017).
Because of the large number of nurses that health care facilities employ, nurse retention and nurse satisfaction are important for facilities’ fiscal integrity. This is because each nurse that leaves a facility costs between $10,000 and $88,000 to replace (Li & Jones, 2013). Also, patient satisfaction scores are positively correlated to nursing satisfaction scores (McNicholas et al., 2017) and these scores are now incorporated into facilities’ reimbursements for services (Moore & Dienemann, 2014). Therefore, any dissatisfied nurses, if they remain or if they leave, have the potential to harm a facility’s fiscal integrity.
In an attempt to address nursing stress and satisfaction, in addition to creating a healthier work environment, a medical center in the Midwest formed a multidisciplinary Nursing Restoration Committee. The primary outcome of this committee was the development of a nursing restoration space. This poster will review the process of developing such a space and its outcome measures, which are still being evaluated.