Resilience and Well-Being in Nursing Contexts
Summary
Nurses routinely confront high workloads, emotional labour and complex patient needs within dynamic healthcare settings. Psychological resilience—the capacity to adapt positively to stress—emerges as a critical determinant of nurse well-being, professional retention and patient safety. Resilience integrates stable traits such as self-efficacy and neuroticism with more malleable intrapersonal factors including coping strategies, mindfulness and social support. Organisational environments further shape resilience through structures that foster professional development, supportive leadership and a culture of collegiality. Well-being in nursing is often characterised by the notion of professional quality of life, which balances positive aspects of caregiving (compassion satisfaction) against negative outcomes such as burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Evidence indicates that resilience not only mitigates emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation but also enhances job satisfaction and intention to remain in the profession. Practical applications range from digital and face-to-face training programmes to systemic interventions targeting workplace culture. Globally, investment in resilience and well-being has become integral to health policy, with mounting recognition that supporting nurse resilience yields dividends in workforce stability, cost containment and quality of care.
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Resilience and Well-Being in Nursing Contexts publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in resilience and well-being in nursing contexts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Psychological resilience: Capacity to maintain or regain mental health in the face of adversity.
Professional quality of life: Net balance of positive and negative feelings resulting from caregiving roles, encompassing compassion satisfaction, burnout and secondary traumatic stress.
Compassion satisfaction: Fulfilment and pleasure derived from helping others through one’s professional role.
Burnout: Syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from prolonged occupational stress.
Secondary traumatic stress: Emotional distress experienced when exposed indirectly to others’ traumatic events.
References
- Effects of interventions to promote resilience in nurses: A systematic review. International Journal of Nursing Studies (2024).
- The relationship between psychological resilience and professional quality of life among mental health nurses: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing (2023).
- Understanding individual resilience in the workplace: the international collaboration of workforce resilience model. Frontiers in Psychology (2015).
- Exploring Environmental Factors in Nursing Workplaces That Promote Psychological Resilience: Constructing a Unified Theoretical Model. Frontiers in Psychology (2016).
- Exploring nurse perceptions and experiences of resilience: a meta-synthesis study. BMC Nursing (2022).
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