Strengthening workplace well‐being: perceptions of intensive care nurses

ABSTRACT Background Intensive care nursing is a professionally challenging role, elucidated in the body of research focusing on nurses' ill‐being, including burnout, stress, moral distress and compassion fatigue. Although scant, research is growing in relation to the elements contributing to critical care nurses' workplace well‐being. Little is currently known about how intensive care nurse well‐being is strengthened in the workplace, particularly from the intensive care nurse perspective. Aims and objectives Identify intensive care nurses' perspectives of strategies that strengthen their workplace well‐being. Design An inductive descriptive qualitative approach was used to explore intensive care nurses' perspectives of strengthening work well‐being. Method New Zealand intensive care nurses were asked to report strategies strengthening their workplace well‐being in two free‐text response items within a larger online survey of well‐being. Findings Sixty‐five intensive care nurses identified 69 unique strengtheners of workplace well‐being. Strengtheners included nurses drawing from personal resources, such as mindfulness and yoga. Both relational and organizational systems' strengtheners were also evident, including peer supervision, formal debriefing and working as a team to support each other. Conclusions Strengtheners of intensive care nurses' workplace well‐being extended across individual, relational and organizational resources. Actions such as simplifying their lives, giving and receiving team support and accessing employee assistance programmes were just a few of the intensive care nurses' identified strengtheners. These findings inform future strategic workplace well‐being programmes, creating opportunities for positive change. Relevance to clinical practice Intensive care nurses have a highly developed understanding of workplace well‐being strengtheners. These strengtheners extend from the personal to inter‐professional to organizational. The extensive range of strengtheners the nurses have identified provides a rich source for the development of future workplace well‐being programmes for critical care.