Nurse leaders and managers can use resilience as a theoretical framework in creating and planning staff development programs as the profession addresses nurses’ satisfaction, engagement, adverse workplace environments, and recruitment and retention challenges.
The goals of this presentation are to: Describe resilience and its relationship to empowering nurses personally and professionally. Identify nurses’ resilience and analyze ways to build resilience through targeted interventions and tools. Share research findings that have contributed to the development of a resilience building mobile application.
Resilience is a concept that has been applied to research and practice in nearly every possible area of life and academia from science to sociology, psychology, nursing and medicine. Nursing has been a focus for studies and interventions that foster resilience in the workplace. Once characteristics that exemplify resilience have been identified resilience can be learned or developed. Nursing literature has noted the impact of resilience in clinical settings correlating the level of professional competence (Gillespie, et al 2007) work engagement (Othman, et al, 2013; Jackson et al., 2007) and the benefit of resilience training programs to reduce PTSD in the workplace (Mealer, Jones, & Moss, 2012).
Responses from a recently conducted survey of professional nursing participants determined resilience score using the 14-item Resilience Scale, which has a reliability ranging from 0.84 to 0.94 alpha coefficients. Initial factor analysis indicates that “acceptance of self and life” and “personal competence” reflects the theoretical definition of resilience (Wagnild and Young, 1993). The scale’s construct validity positively correlates with optimism, morale, self-efficacy, self-reported health, health promoting behaviors, forgiveness, self-esteem, sense of coherence, effective coping, and life-satisfaction. Inversely, the construct is related with depression, stress and anxiety, hopelessness, loneliness somatization, and healthcare visits.
Nursing management, leadership and educators can facilitate resilience in the workplace through strategies that create work-life balance assist in critical reflection to problem solve and build resolutions to help guide in future situations and use a shared or professional governance model. Active participation of nurses through mentorship workshops for critical thinking,mobile applications, debriefing, journaling, empowering staff and leaders that foster professional and caring environments contribute to building hardiness and aids in the development and strengthening of personal resilience.