Title. Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: a literature review Aim. This paper is a report of a literature review to explore the concept of personal resilience as a strategy for responding to workplace adversity and to identify strategies to enhance personal resilience in nurses. Background. Workplace adversity in nursing is associated with excessive workloads, lack of autonomy, bullying and violence and organizational issues such as restructuring, and has been associated with problems retaining nurses in the workforce. However, despite these difficulties many nurses choose to remain in nursing, and survive and even thrive despite a climate of workplace adversity. Data sources.The literature CINAHL, EBSCO, Medline and Pubmed databases were searched from 1996 to 2006 using the keywords 'resilience', 'resilience in nursing', and 'workplace adversity' together with 'nursing'. Papers in English were included. Findings. Resilience is the ability of an individual to positively adjust to adversity, and can be applied to building personal strengths in nurses through strategies such as: building positive and nurturing professional relationships; maintaining positivity; developing emotional insight; achieving life balance and spirituality; and, becoming more reflective. Conclusion. Our findings suggest that nurses can actively participate in the development and strengthening of their own personal resilience to reduce their vulnerability to workplace adversity and thus improve the overall healthcare setting. We recommend that resilience-building be incorporated into nursing education and that professional support should be encouraged through mentorship programmes outside nurses' immediate working environments.

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Internationally, health authorities and governments are warning older people that they are at a higher risk of more serious and possible fatal illness associated with COVID-19. Mortality data from Oxford COVID-19 Evidence Service (25/3/20) indicate a risk of mortality of 3.6% for people in their 60s, which increases to 8.0% and 14.8% for people in their 70s and over 80s. Therefore, the global recommendation for older populations includes social isolation, which involves staying at home and avoiding contact with other people, possibly for an extended period of time, currently estimated to be between three and four months. Older populations in this current

The predominant mode of growth of bacteria in the environment is within sessile, matrix-enclosed communities known as biofilms. Biofilms often complicate chronic and difficult-to-treat infections by protecting bacteria from the immune system, decreasing antibiotic efficacy, and dispersing planktonic cells to distant body sites. While the biology of bacterial biofilms has become a major focus of microbial research, the regulatory mechanisms of biofilm development remain poorly defined and those of dispersal are unknown. Here we establish that the RNA binding global regulatory protein CsrA (carbon storage regulator) of Escherichia coli K-12 serves as both a repressor of biofilm formation and an activator of biofilm dispersal under a variety of culture conditions. Ectopic expression of the E. coli K-12 csrA gene repressed biofilm formation by related bacterial pathogens. A csrA knockout mutation enhanced biofilm formation in E. coli strains that were defective for extracellular, surface, or regulatory factors previously implicated in biofilm formation. In contrast, this csrA mutation did not affect biofilm formation by a glgA (glycogen synthase) knockout mutant. Complementation studies with glg genes provided further genetic evidence that the effects of CsrA on biofilm formation are mediated largely through the regulation of intracellular glycogen biosynthesis and catabolism. Finally, the expression of a chromosomally encoded csrA-lacZ translational fusion was dynamically regulated during biofilm formation in a pattern consistent with its role as a repressor. We propose that global regulation of central carbon flux by CsrA is an extremely important feature of E. coli biofilm development.

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In a climate of a declining nursing workforce where violence and hostility is a part of the day-to-day lives of most nurses, it is timely to name violence as a major factor in the recruitment and retention of registered nurses in the health system. Workplace violence takes many forms such as aggression, harassment, bullying, intimidation and assault. Violent acts are perpetrated against nurses from various quarters including patients, relatives, other nurses and other professional groups. Research suggests that nurse managers are implicated in workplace violence and bullying. Furthermore, there may be a direct link between episodes of violence and aggression towards nurses and sick leave, burnout and poor recruitment and retention rates. This paper explores what is known about workplace violence as it affects nurses, and calls for managerial support and policy to act to improve work environments for all nurses.