“Don’t come to me with your problems – learn some resilience. We have a workshop on Thursday.”
Does this sound familiar?
Whenever I have talked in public about resilience, nursing staff have told me afterwards how their concerns about the emotional impact of their work have been met by some managers with the imperative, “You need to learn some resilience”. Not surprisingly, they feel that their managers are fobbing them off and hiding behind the faddish term of ‘resilience’.
Putting on some ‘count your blessings’ or ‘learn to see the funny side’ sessions is one way of avoiding tackling the difficult challenges of workload and staff turnover. It could be managers’ own survival strategy – or it would be if it worked. We could say that the promotion of resilience in nursing often masquerades as having the worker’s best interests at heart, while its attraction is as a managerial tool to maintain productivity and reduce turnover.
I am not the first or only person to be making this argument about nursing work or any other field of public life. It was 10 years ago that I first stumbled on two pieces of writing, both about resilience. One was an article by economist Mark Neocleous, Resisting Resilience. Published in 2013, the author describes how a turn to resilience embedded itself across military support systems, responses to threats of terrorism and urban planning. He wrote:
“‘Resilience’ has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it.”
He also noted how resilience was making a connection between the personal and the systemic, organisational and political and that the theme of resilience dominated self-help publications. Individuals were being drawn into taking responsibility for system problems.
The second piece that I read was an editorial in Nursing Standard by Jean Gray, Building Resilience in the Nursing Workforce. At the time, I read it as a more-or-less uncritical encouragement to nurses to become more resilient in the face of a range of workplace pressures, but a more careful re-reading shows that Gray was well aware of the combination of ‘adversities’ that nurses face, those intrinsic to the work itself and those that are the effect of ideological, policy and funding decisions. But for Gray’s cautious article, a hundred pieces have since been published that enthusiastically promote resilience training as a solution to a host of entrenched workplace problems. Their message, to put it bluntly, is that systems are far too difficult to change, so nurses should change the way they think instead. To return to Mark Neocleous’ conclusion: “Resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance”. Revealingly, the predominantly psychologically orientated writing about resilience in nursing includes no conception or consideration of system resilience. For most authors of these pieces – often research articles – ‘resilience’ is purely an individual trait, or skill that can be taught and strengthened.
Fortunately, I see an end to this obsession. In July 2020, UK Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee launched an inquiry into workforce burnout and resilience in the NHS and social care sectors. Witness after witness urged the committee that if it wanted to learn about how to address problems in health and social care, it should turn its attention to system resilience, as opposed to an individualised version. I have noticed a similar movement in some recent research publications.
So, will we soon see an end to the idea that personal resilience can shore up system weaknesses? I certainly hope so.
In my third book on resilience in nursing, Nursing COVID and the End of Resilience, which has just been published, I go into these arguments further.
Does this sound familiar?
Whenever I have talked in public about resilience, nursing staff have told me afterwards how their concerns about the emotional impact of their work have been met by some managers with the imperative, “You need to learn some resilience”. Not surprisingly, they feel that their managers are fobbing them off and hiding behind the faddish term of ‘resilience’.
Putting on some ‘count your blessings’ or ‘learn to see the funny side’ sessions is one way of avoiding tackling the difficult challenges of workload and staff turnover. It could be managers’ own survival strategy – or it would be if it worked. We could say that the promotion of resilience in nursing often masquerades as having the worker’s best interests at heart, while its attraction is as a managerial tool to maintain productivity and reduce turnover.
I am not the first or only person to be making this argument about nursing work or any other field of public life. It was 10 years ago that I first stumbled on two pieces of writing, both about resilience. One was an article by economist Mark Neocleous, Resisting Resilience. Published in 2013, the author describes how a turn to resilience embedded itself across military support systems, responses to threats of terrorism and urban planning. He wrote:
“‘Resilience’ has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it.”
He also noted how resilience was making a connection between the personal and the systemic, organisational and political and that the theme of resilience dominated self-help publications. Individuals were being drawn into taking responsibility for system problems.
The second piece that I read was an editorial in Nursing Standard by Jean Gray, Building Resilience in the Nursing Workforce. At the time, I read it as a more-or-less uncritical encouragement to nurses to become more resilient in the face of a range of workplace pressures, but a more careful re-reading shows that Gray was well aware of the combination of ‘adversities’ that nurses face, those intrinsic to the work itself and those that are the effect of ideological, policy and funding decisions. But for Gray’s cautious article, a hundred pieces have since been published that enthusiastically promote resilience training as a solution to a host of entrenched workplace problems. Their message, to put it bluntly, is that systems are far too difficult to change, so nurses should change the way they think instead. To return to Mark Neocleous’ conclusion: “Resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance”. Revealingly, the predominantly psychologically orientated writing about resilience in nursing includes no conception or consideration of system resilience. For most authors of these pieces – often research articles – ‘resilience’ is purely an individual trait, or skill that can be taught and strengthened.
Fortunately, I see an end to this obsession. In July 2020, UK Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee launched an inquiry into workforce burnout and resilience in the NHS and social care sectors. Witness after witness urged the committee that if it wanted to learn about how to address problems in health and social care, it should turn its attention to system resilience, as opposed to an individualised version. I have noticed a similar movement in some recent research publications.
So, will we soon see an end to the idea that personal resilience can shore up system weaknesses? I certainly hope so.
In my third book on resilience in nursing, Nursing COVID and the End of Resilience, which has just been published, I go into these arguments further.
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
