Strengthening workplace well‐being: perceptions of intensive care nurses

Abstract

Background: Intensive care nursing is a professionally challenging role, elucidated in the body of research focusing on nurses' ill-being, including burnout, stress, moral distress and compassion fatigue. Although scant, research is growing in relation to the elements contributing to critical care nurses' workplace well-being. Little is currently known about how intensive care nurse well-being is strengthened in the workplace, particularly from the intensive care nurse perspective. Aims and objectives: Identify intensive care nurses' perspectives of strategies that strengthen their workplace well-being. Design: An inductive descriptive qualitative approach was used to explore intensive care nurses' perspectives of strengthening work well-being. Method: New Zealand intensive care nurses were asked to report strategies strengthening their workplace well-being in two free-text response items within a larger online survey of well-being. Findings: Sixty-five intensive care nurses identified 69 unique strengtheners of workplace well-being. Strengtheners included nurses drawing from personal resources, such as mindfulness and yoga. Both relational and organizational systems' strengtheners were also evident, including peer supervision, formal debriefing and working as a team to support each other. Conclusions: Strengtheners of intensive care nurses' workplace well-being extended across individual, relational and organizational resources. Actions such as simplifying their lives, giving and receiving team support and accessing employee assistance programmes were just a few of the intensive care nurses' identified strengtheners. These findings inform future strategic workplace well-being programmes, creating opportunities for positive change. Relevance to clinical practice: Intensive care nurses have a highly developed understanding of workplace well-being strengtheners. These strengtheners extend from the personal to inter-professional to organizational. The extensive range of strengtheners the nurses have identified provides a rich source for the development of future workplace well-being programmes for critical care.

Factors influencing well‐being in clinical nurses: A path analysis using a multi‐mediation model

“…Consistent with increasing interest in positive psychology, many studies have addressed the personal characteristics of resilience and gratitude disposition in nurses (Jarden, Sandham, Siegert, & Koziol-McLain, 2019). Resilience is 'an individual's ability to bounce back from or cope successfully with adverse circumstances' (Rutter, 2008) and is referred to as a personal characteristic of nurses who face various difficulties and professional challenges, including long working hours, understaffing, poor support and high-accuracy work (Hart, Brannan, & De Chesnay, 2014).…”

Conceptual model for intensive care nurse work well‐being: A qualitative secondary analysis

“…The facets were named using adjectives to support them becoming ICU mission statements, such as “our ICU is healthy , authentic , meaningful , connected and innovative .” These facets scaffold the integration of the empirical and ICU nurse perspectives from the findings of this programme of research. The ICU nurse work well‐being characteristics and their strengtheners were re‐analysed and sorted according to the five facets and then reported alphabetically (Table ).…”

“… Note : This table reports re‐analysed data including ICU nurse‐identified work well‐being characteristics and strengtheners; superscript “A” denotes an actual strengthener, superscript “P” denotes a potential strengthener.…”

“…This study was a qualitative secondary analysis using data from two parent studies . These parent studies were conducted in accordance with the Auckland University of Technology Ethics Committee (17/180), reported previously .…”

“…The characteristics and strengtheners underpinning the authentic facet are presented in Table 1. 43 and strengtheners 44 ; superscript "A" denotes an actual strengthener, superscript "P" denotes a potential strengthener. Abbreviation: ICU, intensive care unit.…”