Workforce Resilience Research Articles

Practitioner experiences in epidemics and pandemics in relation to COVID-19

Background:COVID-19 has been declared an international emergency by the World Health Organization. Despite personal concerns, frontline health professionals, such as paramedics, nurses and doctors, continue to treat patients. Ensuring these workers' mental wellbeing is supported during these stressful times is key to their maintaining good mental health in the longer term.Aim:To conduct a review of the literature exploring practitioners' attitudes during a pandemic.Methods:A scoping literature review was conducted to assess information on health professionals' attitudes during COVID-19 and previous pandemics, and to identify their main concerns and whether these were addressed. PubMed, CINAHL, the Cochrane Library and Google Scholar were searched and PRISMA guidelines were followed. Titles and abstracts were screened and emergent themes were identified and discussed.Results:141 articles were screened; 15 articles were sourced through Google Scholar and reference lists. There were 18 articles in the final sample. There was a lack of published data on COVID-19 at the time of writing. Themes include that health professionals' mental health may be affected during a pandemic. Their biggest concerns are infecting family members and overcoming personal anxieties to continue treating patients. Key themes in protecting staff mental health during a pandemic include increasing their understanding of how to protect themselves and their families, better confidence in personal protective equipment and good managerial communication.Conclusions:Practitioners experience heightened stress levels during pandemics, which may affect their mental health. This has implications for workforce resilience. More research is needed on frontline staff attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their mental health.

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the human resources for health in India and key policy areas to build a resilient health workforce

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the already low resourced, fragmented and largely unregulated health systems in countries like India. It has only further exacerbated the stress on human resources for health (HRH) in many unanticipated ways. We explored the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on the health workforce in India, and analytically extrapolated the learnings to draw critical components to be addressed in the HRH policies, which can further be used to develop a detailed 'health workforce resilience' policy. We examined the existing literature and media reports published during the pandemic period, covering the gaps and challenges that impeded the performance of the health workers. Recommendations were designed by studying the learnings from various measures taken within India and in some other countries. We identified seven key areas that could be leveraged and improved for strengthening resilience among the health workforce. The system-level factors (at macro level) include developing a health workforce resilience policy, planning and funding for emergency preparedness, stakeholder engagement and incentivization mechanisms; the organization-level factors (meso level) include identifying HRH bench strength, mobilizing the health workforce, psycho-social support, protection from disease; and the individual-level factors (micro level) include measures around self-care by health workers. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the associated factors, we emphasize on developing a future-ready health workforce using a multi-sectoral approach for building its strength and resilience.

Resilient Leadership: The Impact of a Servant Leader on the Resilience of their Followers

The Problem Businesses and their leaders regularly face disruptive change, uncertain economic futures and the pressure of improving employee well-being. To not only withstand these crises but to rebound and even grow stronger, organizations must develop resilient leaders and a resilient workforce. Human resource development (HRD) professionals are responsible for resilience development within an organization and need to understand whether the development of servant leaders also increases leader and workforce resilience. The Solution Leaders with a high level of resilience are able to respond in positive ways to crises their organizations may encounter and, by exhibiting that resilience and those positive responses, are able to increase the level of resilience of those around them. Servant leaders focus their efforts on meeting the psychological needs and health of their followers and are therefore well placed to positively impact subordinate resilience. This article explores the ability of servant leadership to positively impact and grow the resilient capacity of those impacted by the servant leader. It proposes that HRD professionals can increase the resilience capabilities of an organization through the development of servant leaders who also exhibit resilient behaviors. The Stakeholders This article benefits organizations, leaders, employees, and HRD professionals as well as resilience and leadership scholars and practitioners.

Bouncing back from Workplace Stress: From HRD’s Individual Employee’s Developmental Focus to Multi-facetted Collective Workforce Resilience Intervention

The ProblemHuman resource development (HRD) research has sought to demarcate a human developmental problem by identifying learning interventions through which individuals can contribute towards group and organizational growth. However, there remains the fundamental problem, which is how to go beyond individualized employee development to a more collective resilience model building against workplace stress. Such lesser effectiveness has led to financial, emotional and psycho-social costs to individuals and collectives. Based on the theoretical analysis of human capital theory, HRD research and literature are lacking in how to more effectively operationalize collective resilience against workplace stress.The SolutionA multi-faceted collective workforce resilience intervention conceptual model is proposed to enable both management and employees to overcome ineffective implementation of human development and thereby bounce back from workforce stress. Four aspects of the model’s practical operationalization are proposed as steps to help the HRD community of practitioners and scholars to engrain resilience as a workplace culture in resolving stress. Implications on (1) the identification of workplace stress, (2) the effective design and operationalization of development capacities. (3) the resilience intervention initiatives, and (4) the management of collective workforce resilience are highlighted.The StakeholdersThe proposed model is designed for the HRD community, including scholars, practitioners, employees and managers in related HRD contexts.

Leadership Approaches to Staff Health and Wellness During COVID-19 Pandemic.

Background: COVID-19 disease as caused by a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2 has taken the world by storm with upwards of 8 million confirmed infections in more than 190 countries. At the writing of this article, over 2 million Americans are confirmed infected and 117,000 have died. Rapid changes to manage COVID-19 care creates significant physical and emotional stress for healthcare employees, including pharmacy staff. Objective: This article provides pharmacy leaders with advice in leading through COVID-19 to promote staff resiliency. Methods: The specific leadership strategies include: (1) identifying and addressing fundamental needs; (2) communicating updated and reliable information; and (3) providing psychological and mental health support. Conclusion: Using various techniques described will help to preserve workforce resilience in providing patient-centered pharmacy services. After reading this article, pharmacy directors will have strategies and resources to maintain employee resiliency during this difficult time.

Moving Forward to Nurture Workforce Resilience in Crisis.

As the CEO of a firm that helps organizations improve performance through culture and learning, and as someone who has spent the past 12 years coaching thousands of individual leaders, staff members, and physicians at hundreds of hospitals and health systems, I have seen both the positive effects of resilience and the negative effects of a lack of resilience. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I and my team have worked with organizations to find ways to help their distressed employees take better care of themselves and, in turn, help their patients as our collective recovery continues.

Workforce Resilience: Integrative Review for Human Resource Development

Resilience is a concept of growing interest in the modern workplace. Multiple stakeholders, including policy makers, organizational leaders, human-resource professionals, and employees discuss resilience as an essential element needed to effectively deal with unexpected and mind-boggling changes that riddle the current workplace. These collective interests are commonly known as workforce resilience. However, there is a lack of consensus as to what causes and entails workforce resilience as well as how to best address the issue for leaders and employees alike. By comparing disciplinary perspectives of resilience and reviewing empirical studies, this study identifies core elements and drivers of workforce resilience in the context of organizational and human resource development. This study also clarifies how workforce resilience should incorporate policies and strategies at the societal and organizational levels together with organizational human-resource interventions.

Reconstructing the workforce within public health protective systems: Improving resilience, retention, service responsiveness and outcomes

BackgroundUnacceptably high staff turnover has plagued traditional approaches to child protection, seemingly forever. Around the globe, numerous studies, reports and inquiries have highlighted how statutory agencies, focusing on risk-oriented investigations of suspected maltreatment, experience significant issues with worker stress and its occupational and organisational consequences. Yet, promoting staff resilience within child protection agencies’ workforces has proved to be quite elusive at a systems level. While concern about child protection services often centers on the children and families agencies they intend to assist, the experiences of workers within the system provide further evidence that the system is itself failing. As a result, governments around the world are increasingly embracing system reforms that promote public health approaches focusing on early intervention and prevention to build child, family and neighbourhood support capacity and resilience and thereby reduce child maltreatment. ObjectiveWe review the workforce issues affecting traditional child protection approaches and its impacts. In light of this, we examine the knowledge to be applied in the development of public health approaches that embrace integrated and coordinated systems of community care. Such reforms, with altered organisational remits that are far broader than narrow tertiary responses of investigation and removal, utilize evidence-based interventions targeted at differentiated risk and service user needs to provide effective supports and reduce maltreatment. This article unpacks the strategies needed to build and properly prepare a re-tooled workforce capable of implementing a public health model of preventive interventions. Participants and settingNot applicable. MethodsCurrent public health reforms are examined through the lens of their potential impacts upon contemporary workforce issues. Focusing upon building a stable, resilient and appropriately skilled workforce for a public health model, we examine the implications for key stakeholders including workers, program and organisational leaders, educators, researchers, academics and community members, especially children and vulnerable families. Results and conclusionsPublic health approaches to protecting children seek to provide effective supports and services in timely ways in order to prevent unnecessary statutory interventions, which affect those from cultural and poor communities disproportionately. But remodelling systems to embrace these approaches entails complex practice, program, policy and legislative changes, using evidence to intervene in ways that are primarily voluntary rather than coercive. In doing so they provide potential to recast the basis of the helping relationship to attend better to the relational aspects of changed behaviour. Embedding workforce resilience strategies in reformed systems is necessary to address retention and ensure service effectiveness and responsiveness to the diversity of needs of struggling families and impoverished communities. Thereby, public health approaches are well placed to achieve their true potential.

A re-examination of the individual differences approach that explains occupational resilience and psychological adjustment among nurses.

This study re-examines the validity of a model of occupational resilience for use by nursing managers, which focused on an individual differences approach that explained buffering factors against negative outcomes such as burnout for nurses. The International Collaboration of Workforce Resilience model (Rees et al., 2015, Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 73) provided initial evidence of its value as a parsimonious model of resilience, and resilience antecedents and outcomes (e.g., burnout). Whether this model's adequacy was largely sample dependent, or a valid explanation of occupational resilience, has been subsequently un-examined in the literature to date. To address this question, we re-examined the model with a larger and an entirely new sample of student nurses. A sample of nursing students (n=708, AgeM ( SD ) = 26.4 (7.7) years), with data examined via a rigorous latent factor structural equation model. The model upheld many of its relationship predictions following further testing. The model was able to explain the individual differences, antecedents, and burnout-related outcomes, of resilience within a nursing context. The results highlight the importance of skills training to develop mindfulness and self-efficacy among nurses as a means of fostering resilience and positive psychological adjustment.

Managing medical emergencies in mental health settings using an interprofessional in-situ simulation training programme: A mixed methods evaluation study

BackgroundIn the UK, people with severe mental illness die up to 20years earlier than the general population, prompting increased focus on physical health in mental illness. However, training for mental health inpatient staff to meet patients' physical health needs has not received the same attention, with physical health training often being reactive and lacking evidence of effectiveness. ObjectivesTo evaluate an interprofessional, in situ, simulation training intervention for managing medical deterioration in mental health settings. Investigating the impact of training on: 1. Participants' knowledge, confidence, and attitudes towards managing medical deterioration; and 2. Incident reporting, as an objective index of incident management. Participants' perceptions of the impact on their practice were qualitatively explored. DesignThis evaluation employed a mixed-methods pre-post intervention design. Participants & SettingsFifty-three healthcare professionals participated including: mental health nurses, psychiatrists, healthcare assistants, and activity co-ordinators from two busy psychiatric triage wards in South London, UK. MethodsThe intervention comprised eight half-day sessions delivered weekly across two wards. Structured surveys assessed participants' knowledge, confidence, and attitudes towards medical deterioration pre and post training. Participants' experience of training was qualitatively captured through post-course surveys and focus groups three months post training. Incident reporting rates for seven-month periods pre and post training were compared. ResultsFollowing training, participants showed significant improvement in knowledge (p<0.001), confidence (p<0.001), and attitudes towards (p<0.02) managing medical deterioration. Incident reporting increased by 33% following training. Participants' reported improved confidence in managing medical deterioration, better understanding of effective communication, improved self-reflection and team working, and an increased sense of responsibility for patients' physical health. ConclusionsInterprofessional, in situ simulation training for medical deterioration yielded promising outcomes for individuals and teams. Simulation is an under-used training modality in mental health, offering a holistic training approach with the potential to provide educational and clinical benefits while supporting workforce resilience.

Understanding individual resilience in the workplace: the international collaboration of workforce resilience model.

When not managed effectively, high levels of workplace stress can lead to several negative personal and performance outcomes. Some professional groups work in highly stressful settings and are therefore particularly at risk of conditions such as anxiety, depression, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout. However, some individuals are less affected by workplace stress and the associated negative outcomes. Such individuals have been described as “resilient.” A number of studies have found relationships between levels of individual resilience and specific negative outcomes such as burnout and compassion fatigue. However, because psychological resilience is a multi-dimensional construct it is necessary to more clearly delineate it from other related and overlapping constructs. The creation of a testable theoretical model of individual workforce resilience, which includes both stable traits (e.g., neuroticism) as well as more malleable intrapersonal factors (e.g., coping style), enables information to be derived that can eventually inform interventions aimed at enhancing individual resilience in the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new theoretical model of individual workforce resilience that includes several intrapersonal constructs known to be central in the appraisal of and response to stressors and that also overlap with the construct of psychological resilience. We propose a model in which psychological resilience is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between neuroticism, mindfulness, self-efficacy, coping, and psychological adjustment.

Analysis of child abuse and neglect research : Mary Porter Martin, Susan L. Klaus and Maure Hurt. George Washington University, Social Research Group, Washington, D.C. January 1978, 41 pp. Availble from the Superintendent of Documents, Goverment Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402, Order Number 017-091-00223-1

Unacceptably high staff turnover has plagued traditional approaches to child protection, seemingly forever. Around the globe, numerous studies, reports and inquiries have highlighted how statutory agencies, focusing on risk-oriented investigations of suspected maltreatment, experience significant issues with worker stress and its occupational and organisational consequences. Yet, promoting staff resilience within child protection agencies’ workforces has proved to be quite elusive at a systems level. While concern about child protection services often centers on the children and families agencies they intend to assist, the experiences of workers within the system provide further evidence that the system is itself failing. As a result, governments around the world are increasingly embracing system reforms that promote public health approaches focusing on early intervention and prevention to build child, family and neighbourhood support capacity and resilience and thereby reduce child maltreatment.We review the workforce issues affecting traditional child protection approaches and its impacts. In light of this, we examine the knowledge to be applied in the development of public health approaches that embrace integrated and coordinated systems of community care. Such reforms, with altered organisational remits that are far broader than narrow tertiary responses of investigation and removal, utilize evidence-based interventions targeted at differentiated risk and service user needs to provide effective supports and reduce maltreatment. This article unpacks the strategies needed to build and properly prepare a re-tooled workforce capable of implementing a public health model of preventive interventions.Not applicable.Current public health reforms are examined through the lens of their potential impacts upon contemporary workforce issues. Focusing upon building a stable, resilient and appropriately skilled workforce for a public health model, we examine the implications for key stakeholders including workers, program and organisational leaders, educators, researchers, academics and community members, especially children and vulnerable families.Public health approaches to protecting children seek to provide effective supports and services in timely ways in order to prevent unnecessary statutory interventions, which affect those from cultural and poor communities disproportionately. But remodelling systems to embrace these approaches entails complex practice, program, policy and legislative changes, using evidence to intervene in ways that are primarily voluntary rather than coercive. In doing so they provide potential to recast the basis of the helping relationship to attend better to the relational aspects of changed behaviour. Embedding workforce resilience strategies in reformed systems is necessary to address retention and ensure service effectiveness and responsiveness to the diversity of needs of struggling families and impoverished communities. Thereby, public health approaches are well placed to achieve their true potential.