Background: Healthcare organisations are increasingly recognising their responsibility to support the wellbeing of nurses as a result of the accumulative demands of their role. Resilience-based clinical supervision is a newly developed intervention that encourages practitioners to pay attention and apply reasoning to behaviours and responses to emotive scenarios through a process of stress alleviation and prevention.

Aims: To evaluate an intervention aimed at supporting pre-registration nursing students to develop resilience-based competencies that enable them to regulate their response to stress and monitor their own wellbeing using mindfulness, reflective discussion and positive reframing.

Method: Case study methodology was used to explore how the characteristics associated with the expression and maintenance of resilience have been influenced by the intervention. Data were collected through focus groups at three timepoints with students and at the end of the intervention period with supervision facilitators, and then analysed by pattern matching to theoretical propositions.

Findings: Participants expressed positive experiences of resilience-based clinical supervision. Their perception of the importance of self-care increased and their commitment to caring for others was maintained. They continued to demonstrate competencies of self-care six months after qualifying as nurses, despite the complexities of the workplace. As qualified nurses, participants recognised the implications of limited time and resources on the quality of care they were able to provide to patients, but they externalised this as organisational failings as opposed to personal inadequacy, and worked around such constraints where possible to maintain personal standards.

Conclusion: Resilience-based clinical supervision has the potential to support healthcare practitioners in developing resilience-based competencies that allow them to recognise and attend to workplace stressors through appropriate and effective alleviation strategies.

Implications for practice:

There is potential to foster resilience where practitioners and healthcare organisations commit to a sustained investment in strategies that promote reflection and self-care

This article by Gemma Stacey, Aimee Aubeeluck, Grace Cook and Snigdha Dutta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.