Nurse resilience: Implications on critical care nurse shortage and proposed intervention

Abstract

<p>Critical care nursing is experiencing a high turnover and a global shortage crisis. The number of critical care nurses (CCNs) leaving the critical care environment is at an unprecedented high rate, negatively impacting the quality of care for the most critically ill of patients. It is not known if and to what extent CCNs resiliency is affected by self-care and how it is associated with compassion satisfaction, interprofessional relationships, professional quality of life, psychological and psychosocial impairment (PPI), or intent to leave the critical care specialty area. The purpose of this quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive project was to ascertain if the independent variable for CCNs self-care had an associative relationship among five dependent variables reflective of CCNs resilience: (a) compassion satisfaction, (b) interprofessional relationships, (c) professional quality of life, (d) PPI, or (e) intent to leave the critical care specialty area. An innovative, webbased CCN self-care intervention was introduced and outcomes measured through the administration of a descriptive survey pre- and post-assessment to determine relational association to the variables of CCNs resilience. The project, though limited by time constraints, inferred CCNs and non-CCNs respondents are interested in self-care and creating healthy critical care environments for safe patient care</p>