Nurse leaders’ strategies to foster nurse resilience

Introduction: Nurse burnout and high nursing turnover rates are common occurrences in healthcare. In
the United States, healthcare employee turnover is on the rise. Hospital turnover rates in 2017 ranged
from 4.5 to 30.7 percent, with an average of 18.2 percent, the highest since 2013. High nurse turnover
rates and nurse burnout impose a significant financial and patient care quality burden on hospitals.
Finding ways to reduce nurse turnover and promote nurse well-being is a top priority for healthcare
executives. Nursing is a significant workforce in healthcare. Nurses' job performance is strongly related to
their work engagement and the safety of their patients and the standard of care the ability of nurse leaders
to lead is positively related to nurses' work performance and nurse resilience building. The current study
aims to identify specific strategies used by nurse leaders to promote nurse resilience.

Method: This is a qualitative descriptive study with a phenomenological overcast. This research design
focuses on participants’ subjective insights. The descriptions of nurse leaders’ experiences of nurturing
nurses are described in an everyday language rather than in more highly abstract, philosophical, or
conceptual terminologies. In this study, nurse leaders were defined as charge nurses, nurse managers, and
nurse executives. A purposive sampling method was used to achieve a maximum variation of nurse
leaders. Information saturation was applied to control the sample size, which led to 20 nurse leaders in
this study.

Results: Seven resilience-building strategies were identified. These strategies were: facilitating social
connections, promoting positivity, capitalizing on nurses’ strengths, nurturing nurses' growth,
encouraging nurses’ self-care, fostering mindfulness practice, and conveying altruism.

Discussion: This study has identified nurse leaders’ strategies to foster nurse resilience. It is evident that
nurse leaders have been actively trying to find ways to help nurses build resilience and combat burnout.
The strategies identified in this study can build nurse resilience by helping nurses shift their focus,
cultivate positivity/optimism, connect with others, practice being in the moment, and improve their
physical health including sleep, exercise, and diet.

JOURNAL REVIEW

Patient safety is one of the main challenges for quality of care, as adverse events are common in health
services. Patient safety is highlighted as one of the main challenges nowadays, as in many cases, patient
care—in addition to system failures, poor organizational processes, and faulty management—also
depends on health professionals. Changing habits requires a better training of these professionals based on
the assumption that several studies indicate that failures in patient safety are also a consequence of human
failures regarding communication, teamwork, and psychological health among health professionals.

Implication to Nursing Practice

The study is able to come up with 7-resilience building strategies to foster nurse resilience, therefore leads
to better patient outcome, heightened patient safety and reduction of errors in the area. These 7-resilience
strategies include facilitating social connections where they create an atmosphere which can help nurses
build interpersonal relationships with others. They were able to conclude that promoting interpersonal
relationships is a fundamental action to enhance a positive culture of individual units and the
organization. While facilitating social connections improves nurses’ morale and engagement at work,
promoting positivity can provide nurses with a healthy work environment and thus improve nurse
resilience. Another strategy that we can apply in our nursing practice is capitalizing on nurses’ strengths
which means recognizing nurses’ strengths and helping them apply their strengths at work. This is a great
way to not only satisfy nurses’ desires but also build up their self-confidence and work engagement. Due
to the high nurse turnover rates, an essential role of nurse leaders is also to nurture their nurses. Nurturing
nurses’ growth is to guide and support nurses to develop personally and professionally. Nurse managers’
willingness to guide and support creates a loving and non-judgmental environment facilitating nurses to
learn and grow. Some of the common problems faced in the area is stress and as a nurse leader, they need
to help nurses recognize the importance of self-care to build their resilience and by that they should
encourage nurses’ self-care- to take the time to care for oneself and that self-care is not a selfish act.

Implication to Nursing Education

This study provides nursing leaders with useful information for clinical use. The solutions revealed in this
study are easy to implement in any clinical setting and are straightforward and cost-effective. Promoting
nurses' professional development will help to increase patient care quality and prevent nurse burnout.
Nurse leaders play a critical role in promoting nurse resilience by adopting and implementing evidence-
based solutions.

Implication to Nursing Research

They can use this study as a reference or a recommendation to further studies. I believe that this type of
research topic is under-researched because we consider it to be unimportant since it focuses on the
psychological aspect of enhancing patient care rather than hands-on solutions. However, because nurses'
perceptions, experience in the field, and behaviors are all equally significant and relevant in nursing care,
research studies like this one should be prioritized to shed light on nurses' psychological and social
aspects in order to enhance health care results.