Facilitating conscious awareness among critical care nurses

Abstract

Critical care nurses experience stressful situations in their daily working environments. The question arises for nurses: are there adequate support systems in the critical care environment and what are critical care nurses doing to mantain their own health and well-being. Facilitating conscious awareness among critical care nurses could enhance their resiliency and their hardiness, strengthening their coping capacities in stressful working situations. The contextual framework adopted for this research was the Neuman Systems Model. A qualitative research approach (exploratory, descriptive and contextual) was used to explore and describe the stress experienced by critical care nurses. Focus group interviews were conducted with critical care nurses and individual interviews with nurse managers. The results revealed their perceptions and experiences about the effects of stress in the critical care environment, as well as some of their coping strategies. Raising critical care nurses' levels of conscious awareness about their coping strategies with stressful events in their daily working lives, could enhance their resiliency and hardiness, enabling them to continue working effectively in stressful environments. This could enhance the general well-being of individual critical care nurses, the nursing care rendered to critically ill patients, and save money for the health care services by reducing turnover rates among critical care nurses.