Resilience of nurses in high stress environments

The study is part of the International Collaboration on Workforce Resilience.

Associate Professor Clare Rees, of the School of Psychology and Speech Pathology at Curtin University, claims thousands of nurses across Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada are expected to participate in a psychological study of resilience this year.

Associate Professor Rees says the study aims to increase resilience in nurses and other health professionals at risk of anxiety, depression, secondary traumatic stress and burnout.

“Basically health professions are all in that category but nursing in particular has got a lot of unique stresses around that job,” she says.

“Sometimes even the work hours in itself, working shifts and working with sometimes really confronting clinical cases…we know there’s high rates of burnout among nurses.”

Working in “high death” areas of practice, nurse 'burnout' and 'compassion fatigue', can sometimes hinder their ability to care for their patients.

“They actually don’t have the resources to tend to their patients in the way that they need to – so, in a way, helping the nurse directly is going to help their patients,” Associate Professor Rees says.

Researchers have developed a new theoretical model to test individual workforce resilience which identifies key psychological variables related to individual workforce resilience, including neuroticism, mindfulness, self-efficacy and coping.

She claims while neuroticism, the tendency to experience enduring negative emotional states such as anxiety, guilt, anger and depression on a more intense and frequent level, is usually genetic and inherited, the other variables are factors that health professionals can control.

“You can change your level of mindfulness, the type of coping that you engage in – whether you use adaptive coping or maladaptive coping,” she says.

“Adaptive coping is things like seeking social support and using humour and so forth, whereas maladaptive coping is more passive – it’s giving up, taking sick days, taking drugs, that sort of thing.

“The other component is self-efficacy – which basically means how much you believe you can do something about your situation.

“These are the key variables in the model that we want to measure in terms of predicting who is actually more resilient – we think those various variables come together to inform which nurse or which psychologist or other health professional is going to be more resilient when you measure them.”

The model will be tested on thousands of student nurses and employed nurses using questionnaires.

Researchers are now trialling a project with nurses at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Nedlands, using a mindfulness based intervention.

According to Associate Professor Rees, using mindfulness, one of the variables in the new model, enables nurses to improve their ability to detach from stressful experiences.

“These nurses are getting taught skills of becoming more mindful – they learn to do some sitting meditations and short breathing spaces, where they learn the skill of changing their focus so that they can separate themselves from events,” she says.

To find out more about the study, email Associate Professor Rees at c.rees@curtin.edu.au.