Promoting Resilience in Nurses: evaluating the impacts of a workplace resilience program on mental health nurse wellbeing

The Promoting Resilience in Nurses (PRiN) program is an applied and sustainable workplace prevention programme which aims to build individual resilience in the context of adversity and stress, increase mental health and wellbeing, and improve coping self-efficacy and interpersonal communication strategies. The program is strengths-based and incorporates the evidence-base of cognitive behavioural and interpersonal approaches with posttraumatic growth theory. The PRiN program has been tailored for mental health nursing, including program content, activities and audio-visual clips relevant to this specialty nursing field. The program is delivered by accredited trained facilitators (in this case, experienced mental health nurses) face-to-face in a peer-group setting in 2 x 6 hour workshops spread three weeks apart. A workshop attendance checklist is kept for each program. The program is multimodal and manualized, employing a range of teaching modalities including workbooks, PowerPoint, group discussion (large and small) and individual activities. ‘Booster’ activities (1 per week) reinforcing particular resilience strategies in the program are sent by SMS to participants in between the two workshop days, with provision of weekly activities for each of three weeks following completion of the final workshop. Booster activities take ~10 minutes. An example is to remind participants to use thought challenges to change negative self-talk. Topics covered in the 6 program modules are: identifying strengths and understanding resilience; understanding and managing stress; challenging and changing negative self-talk; drawing strength from adversity; promoting positive relationships and managing conflict; and creating solutions for well-being.