The Limits of Resilience as an Approach to Addressing the Mental Health
Impacts of COVID-19 on Nurses: Issue Brief
November 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic placed extraordinary pressure on nurses and health-care systems. Nurses continued to provide care, lead pandemic response efforts and support patients and communities while facing sustained workload pressures, uncertainty and significant impacts on their own mental health and wellbeing.
During this period, resilience was often presented as an important way to help health-care workers cope. This NNPBC issue brief takes a closer look at that idea and asks an important question: what happens when resilience is treated primarily as an individual responsibility rather than a responsibility shared by health-care systems and organizations?
The brief recognizes that personal resilience, mental health supports and safe spaces to talk about stress can all be valuable. At the same time, it argues that asking nurses to simply become more resilient can shift attention away from the working conditions and system-level challenges contributing to distress in the first place. In some cases, pressure to demonstrate resilience may also make it harder for nurses to speak openly about feeling overwhelmed or needing support.
Instead, NNPBC calls for a broader approach—one that supports individual wellbeing while also building resilience into the health system itself. This includes safe work environments, meaningful nursing participation in decisions that affect practice and retention, opportunities for nurses to work to their full scope, and nursing leadership wherever health-care decisions are being made.
Originally developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue brief offers a useful perspective on a question that extends beyond the pandemic: how can we support nurses without placing the responsibility for difficult working conditions on nurses themselves?
The brief also includes key messages, further reading and mental health resources available at the time of publication.
Download the issue brief to explore NNPBC’s perspective on resilience, mental health and the need for system-level solutions to support nurses.