Developing A Resilient Workforce

Introduction

The paradigm of resilience is a significant force for promulgation in professional or personal lives. Resilience provides a repertoire of adaptive approaches to work competently against the stressful environment in social, professional, and personal spaces. In a professional environment, resilience facilitates a positivist approach to efficient problem-solving, motivation and adaptability. Resilience is not only a reactive approach that triggers when an individual faces a challenge. It is a proactive approach to professional life to enable and maintain motivation, work stress management, adaptability, and efficient problem-solving. Employers in any professional field devise a resilient workforce to handle stress in an enhanced way. Resilience displays immense significance in the social and healthcare system. This reflection essay elucidates the exponential attributes of resilience along with its practical implications and guidance as a resilient workforce in the social and healthcare sectors.

Resilience: General Overview

The component of resilience can be explicated in terms of adaptation towards the stressful environment, trauma, or complicated sources of stressful relationships (family or personal). Resilience is a hub of several interrelated factors. These eminent factors are self-esteem, confidence, effectiveness, and problem-solving repertoire of approaches. The literal meaning of resilience is flexibility and pliability, which foreshadows its importance in practical life. For instance, if any person is feeling a personal or professional stressor, he or she adapts to the stressful environment to generate the highest level of self-efficacy despite the external circumstances. People effectively use these stressors and grow in a resourceful manner. They effectively grow from their complicated difficulties. Sometimes, these stressors are important for boosting a person’s productivity and competency level.

The eminent factor of risk cannot be eliminated from our lives because there is no ideal workplace where the factor of risk is eliminated. The risk factors can be present in any setting with various types of nature. The risk factors can be confronted in culture, community, family, and/or as an individual. There is no age limit for tackling risk. It is present throughout our life from early childhood to old adulthood age. However, a moderate amount of stress is mandatory for people to work efficiently and boost their proficiency. If the element of stress is eliminated from the environment, a person becomes sluggish and indolent. A person needs a reasonable amount of stressors to work on and develop resilient power against their challenging situations (stressors). Therefore, this reflection aims to unveil the components of a resilient workforce, primarily in the healthcare and social sectors.

Resilient Workforce In The Health Care Sector

The healthcare sector is always involved with immense complications and stressors on a daily basis. The lives of healthcare workers have always been stressful and demanding in given circumstances. After a terrible encounter, stress, and awful openness, people have diverse mental responses, and surprisingly, this affects their professional performance in a medical organization.

The main approach and objective of any healthcare organization is to understand the cause of complications and identify management failures, as well as to provide adaptive approaches to tackle ordeals and reduce/ eliminate them. The healthcare environment has always been volatile and complex. Conflicting situations, iniquitousness, and injustice lead a healthcare worker to be less resilient, efficient, and motivated towards his or her profession. Therefore, the health care system should improve its programs to promote positive behaviours against stressful situations and conflicts and improve patient safety. The healthcare system should encourage efficient communication and resourceful training to enhance resilience among healthcare workers.

Policymakers, healthcare management, and regulators are working on developing resilient workforce strategies to tackle the complications in the healthcare sector. The resiliency programs in the health care system focus on the analysis of adverse settings (Hospitals, Nursing homes, Ambulance Care, Casualty clinics, Home Health care, and emergency services).

Risk management within the health care administration introduces approaches and training programs that evaluate traumatic situations and work in different steps. The first step in devising resilient programs in workplaces is to evaluate/ analyze all types of potential threats/ risks and vulnerable situations. The management of the hospital uses a panel of specialists and policymakers to devise and implement policies and programs based on emergency plans and risk management. Effective communication should be inculcated in the medical sector between the practitioners and the management to overcome these vulnerable situations effectively. The health care system works on multiple levels and settings to explore the implementation of resilience, competency of health workers, and effective patient care.

Recommendations For A Resilient Workforce In Healthcare System

The healthcare system should devise new emergency plans and training programs to inculcate resilience within healthcare providers. The “All-Hazard Approach” should be used to analyze all types of potential threats and vulnerable situations one can encounter in the medical sector. Healthcare management should have an effective follow-up plan for such risk management. To facilitate efficient and well-coordinated patient care, the management should maintain and develop communication plans for exhibiting resilience in health care providers against any vulnerability or emergency in emergency systems and health care departments. A healthcare practitioner needs to adopt a resilient approach. Doctors and other healthcare staff should perceive their work as a way to help their patients become healthier rather than just fixing their problems. Most importantly, healthcare workers always focus on helping others rather than themselves. Healthcare management needs to establish programs that can help these workers focus on their health and stress management. These strategic training programs should focus on normal tasks/ activities like stress check-ins, meditational sessions, and short walks to help them take care of themselves.

Resilient Workforce In The Social Care Sector

Social work in socio-technical systems is unquestionably a demanding and challenging profession. Social practitioners and workers are vulnerable to various degrees of stress and complex situations. Therefore, the paradigm of “Resilience Engineering” is introduced in the contemporary era. The “Resilience Engineering” is devised to incorporate safety management plans in the social departments. The main focus of “Resilience Engineering” is to devise plans and strategies for the social system to deal with disastrous situations, vulnerable threats, and complex conditions. The disciplines which come in this focus are social care, natural disasters, health care sectors, and others. Social work in the social sector is highly impacted by workforce stress and emotional turmoil. The social care department is working on “Individual coping approaches” to manage the stressful pressure a social care worker has to go through.

However, the concept of resilience has been a controversial issue in the social care department. The impact of organizational culture on social care worker’s emotional resilience is coming to the limelight for research and development. The focus on an individual’s capacity to exhibit resilience is unlikely to create a positive impact on the culture of resilience in the social care sector. In the last few years, the individual approach has turned into a collective approach to address the social system. The main focus of social care management is to work on the collective sense of resilience within the social system. The implication of the culture of resilience in the social care department requires strategies and plans to recognize the tensions and challenges in social work practice. Emotional resilience is the cardinal point in a social care department. Social care providers/ workers should work on their emotional resilience in this field. Social care management works on the concerns and well-being of social workers to make them efficient on the frontline. Social care management values the concerns of their social workers with their service users. They conduct meetings and sessions with their social workers to analyze their workload management and performance pointers.

Recommendations For Resilient Workforce In The Social Care System

A social care system should incorporate positive attributes to exhibit a resilient organizational culture. The main focus of any social care management should be on the social worker’s stress, workload, and potential threats he or she is facing while working in the professional field. They should devise structured peer group support programs and internal and external supervision for their social care workers to conduct their tasks efficiently. These supervision strategies will enable the social workers to open up to their organization for emotional support and relieve their stress. If a social care worker exhibits emotional experience, it should be perceived as a professional indicator. The priority of social care management should be to build a positive culture where the workers feel their importance and security towards their management. Resilience in the social care sector can help professionals propagate, rather than shrink from, trauma and complicated situations. The strategies and plans explicating peer support and joint training programs can amplify resilience in a social care organization. Furthermore, these strategies can build a sense of solidarity and harmony within the culture of any social care sector. Chronic trauma or stress of social workers should be viewed as a rampant organizational issue that should be addressed rapidly. The root cause of a complicated situation should be addressed rather than assigning the expectation on individual social workers to recuperate adequately to start their work again in the same challenging circumstances.

The Impact Of Resilience On Professionals In The Health And Social Care Sector

The importance of resilience in the professional field of health and social care management cannot be undermined. The implication of resilience is significant in the social care and health care workplaces/ workforces. The cardinal components of resilience for an individual within the field of professionalism are the following:

• Following a meaningful goal
• Self-Awareness
• Contest the assumptions
• Cognitive flexibility and adaptation
• Development and promulgation through suffering
• Acting wisely, regardless of the stressful situation
• The positive regulation of emotions and sentiments
•  To exhibit Self-efficacy
• Social support

In the social and healthcare workforce environment, resilience is the cardinal point for handling the challenging situations that social workers, social care management, doctors, nurses, and healthcare management face. The social care worker and health care staff frequently exhaust themselves because of dealing with complex and stressful situations daily. Professional workers who sturdily handle the risks, pressures, tormented behaviours, and complex situations are called resilient individuals. Resilience can be exhibited through various parts of the professional field. Strong and resilient professionals will deal with themselves as well as others on a daily basis and during crises. They will offer dynamic help to their social networks, work environments, and neighbourhoods. One can easily identify resilient individuals since they are certain and idealistic about their future and trust that they will beat their present challenges. A resilient professional looks truly and intellectually strong and can recuperate quickly from any potential crisis or risk.

Workforce resilience immensely impacts job satisfaction, work commitment, employee engagement, and positive organizational assurance. Resilience in any professional space is highly dependent on professional integrity. If an organization guarantees the professional integrity of its employees, a resilient culture can easily be cultivated within that organization. Resilience courses for health care professionals and social care workers can help them develop capabilities to uphold their social relationships and physical and emotional health. Social and healthcare management should focus on creating more resilient workforces and a resilient culture within their organizations. Management needs to show professional integrity and empathy if their practitioners and employees are exhausted or burnt out.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the component of resilience has immense significance in the professional and personal lives. It is vital to understand resilience and implicate it within the respective environments of the health care and social sectors. Research studies and management programs have been set up in the past few years to enhance resilience in healthcare systems and social care culture.

More emphasis must be put on the implementation of resilient policies and programs. The apprehensive situation caused by the global coronavirus pandemic has amplified the need for resilience and adaptability in personal and professional lives. The requirement for the implementation of resilience has increased to a massive level because of COVID-19. The health care workers and social workers are traumatized by the unanticipated blowout of COVID-19, which leads them to vulnerability. Therefore, the government, health care management, and social policymakers must take radical steps to elucidate new resilient approaches for adaptability against unforeseen trauma and stress. Modern and innovative interventions and resilience programs should be introduced in social and healthcare systems.

References

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