Resilience and Change
Resilience can be defined as the capacity to recuperate from strain and growing stronger swiftly. Healthcare workers should understand resilience as they come across it daily when assessing their well-being, affliction, and quality of life. High levels of stress experienced by healthcare practitioners can be detrimental and lead to moral distress, fatigue, and other dangerous impacts. Despite all these adversities, nurses can manage their work environment through resilience and maintain stable physical and psychological functioning. Exposure to various demanding environments and situations teaches resilient nurses to overcome these adversities and develop much better mechanisms to overcome stress.
Steps to Take to Develop More Resilience in Practice Setting
Stress is a significant concern facing individuals in the nursing profession. The pressure is commonly brought about by little time for personal care, aggression in the line of work, uncertainty in treatment, inability to provide quality care, lack of emotional readiness, patient death, and conflicts with peers. These depressive aspects may cause physical and mental adversities like low concentration, depression, exhaustion, emotional fatigue, and irritability. (Garcia-Izquierdo et al., 2018).
Resilience results from individual responsibility, confidence, and being creative, flexible, and light-hearted in the work environment and could be enhanced by having strong beliefs and upholding ethical standards. Seeking and accepting social support by spending time with family and friends can significantly improve your emotional well-being and improve resilience. To develop stability in the nursing practice, it is vital to possess the know-how and skills in managing personal and professional time by being specific with priorities (Kester & Wei, 2018). Building supportive relationships and social support and maintaining an optimistic and realistic outlook is vital in finding a balance in life.
As a nurse, attending to your health and well-being is an excellent step towards attaining resilience. Developing the skill to balance negative emotions while focusing on the positive aspects of one’s experience leads to achieving a positive mindset as a nurse. Imitating sturdy role models is one way of developing the resilience of a nurse. It is recommended that nurses be given a chance to acquire practical knowledge from other health practitioners. Senior colleagues in the nursing profession should set a good example, coach, mentor, and motivate those joining the healthcare profession. Some factors that predict strength, such as the ability to adapt to change, positive identity, support from social circles, coping skills, spirituality, and finding meaning in difficulties, can be acquired and developed through training (Kester & Wei, 2018). Turning to religious and spiritual practices eases the burden of feeling powerless to provide quality healthcare to a patient. Having a moral and spiritual compass helps nurses to face their challenges with optimism and without fear yet willing to accept the unchangeable.
How to Communicate a Change in Practice to Patients and Nursing peers
Like in every profession, change in the nursing practice is necessary because stagnation jeopardizes the future course. For change to occur, specific factors should be implemented, such as a direction for the profession, a functional and practical leadership structure, and rewarding and promoting growth. Effective communication to take place media such as soft, print, and personal interaction should be explored to ensure that the message is passed and received (Shorey, Siew &Ang, 2018). Therefore, communication can be carried out through work emails, internal memos, workshops, or departmental meetings.
Continuous and practical communication is essential in the course of change. In implementing change, there should be a plan to decide who the concerned parties are when they need to know, what they need to know and how the communication will be made. Contact should be made to the right individuals to understand why, how, and when the change will affect them.
References
García-Izquierdo, M., Meseguer de Pedro, M., Ríos-Risquez, M. I., & Sánchez, M. I. (2017). Resilience as a moderator of psychological health in chronic stress (Burnout) in a sample of hospital nurses. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 50(2), 228-236. https://doi.org/10.1111/jnu.12367
Kester, K., & Wei, H. (2018). Building nurse resilience. Nursing Management (Springhouse), 49(6), 42-45. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.numa.0000533768.28005.36
Shorey, S., Siew, A. L., & Ang, E. (2018). Experiences of nursing undergraduates on a redesigned blended communication module: A descriptive qualitative study. Nurse Education Today, 61, 77-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2017.11.012