Have you thought about resilience lately? Not your patients’ abilities to withstand critical illness and emerge with their functional status intact, but rather, your own resilience. The suffering you witness, the complexity of your work environments, and the ethically troubling situations in critical care can cause emotional stress, moral distress, and burnout.

Just as low resilience increases our patients’ risk of complications, nurses risk leaving nursing when we cannot bounce back from the negative impact of our jobs. Although research shows a correlation between individual characteristics and resilience, we also know that unhealthy work environments threaten our integrity. Patients and their families expect skilled care and emotional support, but with fewer nurses, our capacity may be stretched thin. Building resilience matters; our patients and their families depend on it.

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