Resilience in the workplace: personal and organisational factors

According to the Medical Dictionary (2017), resilience is the ability to ‘recover quickly from illness, change or misfortune’ and in the context of the workplace to ‘bounce back’ from adversity and difficult circumstances.

It is unsurprising that healthcare providers are keen to have resilient staff and thus why this attribute is promoted, for example, by Health Education England (2017) for existing health professionals and by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (2017) in the draft Standards of Proficiency for Registered Nurses.

Although it is clearly necessary to develop resilience in learners and practitioners, Traynor (2017) argues that much of the considerable literature about resilience is overly individualistic. The implication is that it is the responsibility of the individual to learn to be resilient to ‘solve the problem’ of health workplace stress, with less emphasis placed on the responsibility of the care provider organisation to promote healthy work environments for staff wellbeing.