Healthcare professionals and their organisations are subject to growing pressures, including regular reviews and reorganisations, coping with the impact of an aging population, financial pressures, shrinking of career prospects and enhanced expectations of what a healthcare system can do. This practical guide has been written specifically for individuals who are experiencing anxieties engendered by working in healthcare. It examines the reasons why healthcare organisations are susceptible to these difficulties and considers the possible causes of such stress.

In this book, the author explores what day-to-day pressures are and why they seem to affect healthcare staff in different ways. He offers a helpful model of personal resilience with thoughtful and easily applied strategies for survival.

This useful resource gives you the knowledge, tools, and encouragement you need to embark on your journey to becoming a hardier, more successful person. More than experience or training, resilience in the face of stressful situations and rapid changes determines whether you ultimately succeed or fail in the workplace. It allows you to thrive even in tumultuous conditions, to turn potential disasters into growth opportunities. The good news for the legions of other workers who become overwhelmed by stress is that resilience in the face of life’s problems is not an inborn personality trait, but a set of skills and attitudes that you can learn and develop. Packed with insightful examples, case studies, and self-assessment tools, Resilience at Work explains how to: Approach change as a meaningful challenge no matter how stressful the circumstances, and stay committed to your work, rather than detaching and giving up. Gain control by understanding the upside and the downside of change, and take actions to influence beneficial outcomes. Turn stressful changes to your advantage and map out sound problem-solving strategies. Resolve ongoing conflicts and build an environment of assistance and encouragement between you and your coworkers. Decrease feelings of isolation and powerlessness by understanding the 3Cs that give you the ability to thrive amid disruptive changes: commitment, control, and challenge. Reorganization, downsizing, mergers, budget pressures, transfers, job insecurity, and more are producing today’s unpredictable, pressure-cooker conditions, and making it harder for less resilient people to achieve the success they deserve. Resilience at Work supplies insights and strategies you can use to combat your fear of change and uncover the opportunities that can be found in even the most stressful situations.

Properly performing health care systems require concepts and methods that match their complexity. Resilience engineering provides that capability. It focuses on a system’s overall ability to sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions rather than on individual features or qualities. This book contains contributions from international experts in health care, organisational studies and patient safety, as well as resilience engineering. Whereas current safety approaches primarily aim to reduce the number of things that go wrong, Resilient Health Care aims to increase the number of things that go right.

"This book is of value to nurses at all levels of their career."--Critical Care Nurse "This is a very practical and easy to read book with many strategies to help new nurses adapt to the stressors of the workplace. It is filled with thought-provoking stories and activities that can foster confidence in tackling workplace issues as well as self-care activities to enhance wholeness and wellbeing. Some suggested strategies for successful outcomes include finding a good mentor, relaxation techniques, using humor, self-reflection, and exercising. There is something in this book for everyone."Score: 96, 4 stars. --Doody's Medical Reviews This essential resource is for nursing and allied health students across the globe who are undertaking-or are about to undertake-their internship and initial work experience. This reference identifies practical strategies for career advancement and for overcoming stressors and challenges in the workplace. With the tools from this book, readers will be able to gain the strength and tactics to break the cycles of hostility and workplace negativity, and thereby change the health system and provide better care for their clients. Key Features: Presents primary narratives and resilience strategies Provides creative resolutions for coping with complex clients, grief, inter-professional tensions, and more difficult issues Contains reader activities that encourage students to become agents of change Highlights resilience strategies; key coping mechanisms; lessons learned; discussion questions; creative thinking exercises; and teacher-related activities

The nursing profession is under pressure. Financial demands, student debt, the target culture, political scrutiny in the wake of major care scandals and increasing workloads are all taking their toll on professional morale and performance. This timely book considers the meaning of resilience in this adverse context and explains why measures to preserve individual nurses’ and students’ well-being are flawed if they don’t take into account wider political and organizational perspectives. Arguing that healthcare can be thought about and experienced differently, this book: provides a summary of the latest research on resilience, explaining its relevance and also limitations for nurses; considers debates about compassion and highlights the effects of policy agendas on nurse education and nursing work; re-evaluates nursing’s professional identity, including where nursing has come from and the effects of class, gender and race on its powerbase; assesses the role of politics and social media, both in driving change and feeding resistance; and introduces the idea of critical resilience as a complete framework for resisting bullying and fostering survival and change in the nursing workforce. Direct, upbeat, at times provocative and witty, this agenda-setting book enables nurses to understand why they feel the way they do. It also lists what opportunities are available to them to change, resist and survive in what has become a complex, challenging – if still deeply rewarding – line of work.

Patient-centered, high-quality health care relies on the well-being, health, and safety of health care clinicians. However, alarmingly high rates of clinician burnout in the United States are detrimental to the quality of care being provided, harmful to individuals in the workforce, and costly. It is important to take a systemic approach to address burnout that focuses on the structure, organization, and culture of health care. Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being builds upon two groundbreaking reports from the past twenty years, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century, which both called attention to the issues around patient safety and quality of care. This report explores the extent, consequences, and contributing factors of clinician burnout and provides a framework for a systems approach to clinician burnout and professional well-being, a research agenda to advance clinician well-being, and recommendations for the field.

Suffering is an unavoidable reality in health care. Not only are patients and families suffering but also the clinicians who care for them. Commonly the suffering experienced by clinicians is moral in nature, in part a reflection of the increasing complexity of health care, their roles within it, and the expanding range of available interventions. Moral suffering is the anguish that occurs when the burdens of treatment appear to outweigh the benefits; scarce human and material resources must be allocated; informed consent is incomplete or inadequate; or there are disagreements about goals of treatment among patients, families or clinicians. Each is a source of moral adversity that challenges clinicians' integrity: the inner harmony that arises when their essential values and commitments are aligned with their choices and actions. If moral suffering is unrelieved it can lead to disengagement, burnout, and undermine the quality of clinical care. The most studied response to moral adversity is moral distress. The sources and sequelae of moral distress, one type of moral suffering, have been documented among clinicians across specialties. It is vital to shift the focus to solutions and to expanded individual and system strategies that mitigate the detrimental effects of moral suffering. Moral resilience, the capacity of an individual to restore or sustain integrity in response to moral adversity, offers a path forward. It encompasses capacities aimed at developing self-regulation and self-awareness, buoyancy, moral efficacy, self-stewardship and ultimately personal and relational integrity. Clinicians and healthcare organizations must work together to transform moral suffering by cultivating the individual capacities for moral resilience and designing a new architecture to support ethical practice. Used worldwide for scalable and sustainable change, the Conscious Full Spectrum approach, offers a method to solve problems to support integrity, shift patterns that undermine moral resilience and ethical practice, and source the inner potential of clinicians and leaders to produce meaningful and sustainable results that benefit all.

As the pace of change continues to increase, resilience has become an even more critical life skill for surviving and thriving in turbulent organizations. This book contains 21 essential keys to help you better anticipate, understand, absorb, and adapt to the changes you and your organization face now and in the years to come. Each of these is based on years of solid observation and research involving thousands of people in hundreds of organizations.

It's the quintessential buzz word of modern life. It hangs on everyone's lips from the first miles of the morning commute until the screeching alarm clock starts yet another day. Countless articles and studies tell the same story: lives controlled by unmanaged stress end early and none too well. This book describes a simple, straightforward method readers can learn and practice to literally transform stress by shifting the heart's own rhythms. At the core of the HeartMath method of emotional regulation is the idea that, by focusing on positive feelings such as appreciation, care, or compassion, anyone can create dramatic changes in his or her heart rhythms. These changes precipitate a series of neural, hormonal, and biochemical events that dissipate stress and anger and lead to greater well-being. The benefits from using this system are remarkable and far-reaching: blood pressure drops, stress hormone levels fall, immune system activity increases, and anti-aging hormone levels rise. Through its interactive learning system, this book teaches readers to use the HeartMath method, enabling them to see and experience in real time how thoughts and emotions affect their heart rhythms. It teaches them how to engage their hearts to bring emotion, body, and mind into balance, and helps them stay in a zone of focused clarity, optimal health, and high performance. Changes brought about through this method are fast-acting and long-lasting, the perfect antidote to our chaotic and fast-paced lives. HeartMath is a registered trademark of the Institute of HeartMath.