Exploring resilience from psychiatric nurses experience in a tertiary mental health institution

• Main Author: Paat, JN Junnile Soliven
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: Psychiatric nurses; Psychiatric nursing; Mental health personnel; Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/498
• Institution: De La Salle University

Mental health and psychiatry is one of the challenging and stressful specialty fields in nursing. There have been studies conducted regarding adversities encountered by psychiatric nurses, however, there is no known information pertaining to the development of resilience among Filipino psychiatric nurses. The primary purpose of this study is to explore the construct of resilience based on the experiences of Filipino psychiatric nurses and to develop a comprehensive model that depicts the psychiatric nurses resiliency.Strauss and Corbins grounded theory design was utilized. A total of 33 psychiatric nurses were purposely chosen to participate in the study, where 28 of them underwent individual interviews and 5 participated in the focused-group discussion. Field texts were subjected to thematic analysis involving open, axial and selective coding. The truthfulness and validity of the findings was ensured through member checking, peer debriefing, inquiry auditing and methods triangulation.The study generated the protective factors, adaptive strategies, and the salient characteristics of psychiatric nurses. The protective factors of resilience included positive view of mental health, confidence, sense of fulfillment, optimism, support system and strong faith in God. The psychiatric nurses employed the following adaptive strategies: enforcing the standards of mental health, seeking social support, continuing education, maintaining physical and mental fitness, and acceptance. Demonstrating high frustration tolerance, flexibility, optimism, empathy, assertiveness, and being content were the salient characteristics of resilient psychiatric nurses. Finally the emerging model of psychiatric nurses’ resilience comprises of seven phases: acquiring foundational resilience immersion with adversities yielding with positivities surmounting the adversities consolidating personal strengths and external resources pursuing the profession as destiny and vocation and unfolding resilience.This study afforded a theoretical model with the view of contributing an explicit understanding on how psychiatric nurses develop their resilience amidst adversities. Understanding this process will help nurses enhance their identified strengths and will help counseling psychologists to understand better the needs of this group of health professionals in helping them reach their full potential as providers and promoters of mental health.