Helping early career nurses cope with occupational stress
Working in a hospital as a nurse can be a highly stressful ordeal. Overwhelming workloads, understaffing, abuse and workplace bullying are just some of the issues nurses must face on a daily basis. Combining this with the grim environment of regularly seeing others suffer can simply be too much for some nurses to handle. To survive in this environment, nurses need to develop resilience to the stressors they face on a daily basis. This takes time, leaving early career nurses to be particularly vulnerable to burn out.
Research question
How can early career nurses be better supported as they enter the workforce?
Project OutcomeS
- The development of Vita, a digital reflective journal for early career nurses.
- An overview of the causes and effects of occupational stress within the healthcare industry.
Procedure
The project began with a comprehensive summary of inputs and outputs of occupational stress within the healthcare system.
A literature review of techniques for managing occupational stress.
Interview sessions were conducted with nurses in their first year of employment and senior nursing management staff.
Several design concepts were generated in response to interview data.
Preliminary user testing was conducted to in/validate various design proposals.
A final design prototype was built with further user testing conducted for key features.
Summary flow chart of a review of issues within the Australian health care system.
“you don’t know everything... it makes you self doubt and you’re still trying to figure out what you have to do”
Excerpts from interviews with early career nurses.
Key insights
In Australia, 35-60% of new graduate nurses leave their role within the first year of employment.
In order to manage the stresses that are intrinsic to their healthcare role, nurses are required to develop high emotional intelligence (the ability to identify and manipulate ones own felt emotions and the emotions of others).
Support networks to assist early career nurses develop their stress management drop off upon leaving the university education and hospital training programs.
Developing emotional intelligence is best done by consciously reflecting on ones own experiences through debrief exercises.
Design
Vita is a digital reflective journal for early career nurses in Australia designed as part of a research project: Occupational Stress in the Nursing Workplace. In this project, I conducted a user-driven iterative process, engaging with early career nurses to develop a system to aid in managing occupational stress. Vita assists early career nurses in developing emotional resilience to workplace stressors during their transition from training to professional practice.
Vita prototype, a digital reflective journal for early career nurses.
Vita guides, encourages and manages the user's progress towards becoming a robust professional through simple daily debrief activities.
With each entry, the user progressively builds a chronological visualisation of their progress through a series of line graphs of their stress levels that wane with the passing of time.
A user evaluation of debrief activities was tested with early career nurses in early stages of development.