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 space. In a professional environment, resilience facilitates a positivist approach for efficient problem solving, motivation and adaptability. Resilience is not only a reactive approach that triggers when an individual faces a challenge. It is a pro-active approach for 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 the stress in an enhanced way. Resilience displays immense significance in the social and health care 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 sector.
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 eminent factors interrelated. 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 himself 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 the productivity and competency level of a person.
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 efficiently work 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 stressor to work upon 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 sector.
Resilient Workforce in the Health Care Sector
The health care sector is always been involved with immense complications and stressors on daily basis. The lives of the health care workers have always been stressful and demanding as given circumstances are. 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 health care organization is to understand the cause of complication and identify the management failures to provide adaptive approaches to tackle the ordeal and reduce/ eliminate it. The health care environment has always been volatile and complex. The conflicting situations, iniquitousness, and injustice lead a health care worker to be less resilient, efficient, and motivated towards his or her profession. Therefore, the health care system should improvise its programs to promote positive behaviors against stressful situations and conflicts to improve patient safety. The health care system should encourage efficient communication, resourceful training for enhancing resilience amongst the health care workers.
Policymakers, health care management, and regulators are working on developing resilient workforce strategies to tackle the complications in the health care 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 the policies and programs which are based on emergency plan 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 Resilient Workforce in Healthcare system
The Health care system should devise new emergency plans and training programs for inculcating resilience within the health care 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. The health care management should have an effective follow-up for such risk management plans. 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 vulnerable or emergency in emergency systems and health care departments. There is a resilient approach which a healthcare practitioner needs to adopt. The doctors and other health care staff should perceive their work as a way to facilitate their patients to be healthier, rather than just fixing their problems. Most importantly, health care workers always focus on helping others rather than themselves. The health care management needs to establish programs that can facilitate these workers to 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 to take care of themselves.
Resilient Workforce in the Social Care Sector
Social work in socio-technical systems is unquestionably a demanding and challenging profession. The 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 disaster, 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 a 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. The social care providers/ workers should work upon their emotional resilience to work in this field. Social care management works on the concerns and well-being of social workers to make them efficient in 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 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, work-load, and potential threats he or she is facing while working in the professional field. They should devise structured peer group support programs, 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 a social care sector can support the professionals to 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 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 health care workforce environment, resilience is the cardinal point to handle the challenging situations that both social workers, social care management, doctors, nurses, and healthcare management does. The social care worker and health care staff frequently exhaust themselves because of dealing with complex and stressful situations daily. The professional workers, who sturdily handle the risks, pressures, tormented behaviors, and complex situations are called resilient individuals. Resilience can be exhibited through various parts of the professional field. A strong and resilient professional will deal with themselves as well as other on daily basis and during crises. They will offer dynamic help to their social networks, work environments, and neighborhoods. One can easily identify resilient individuals since they are certain and idealistic about their future since they 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, resilient culture can easily be cultivated within that organization. Resilience courses for health care professionals and social care workers can facilitate them to develop capabilities to uphold their social relationships, psychical and emotional health. Social and health care management should focus on creating more resilient workforces and a resilient culture within their organizations. The management needs to implicate professional integrity and empathy, if their practitioners and employees are exhausted or burnout.
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 sector. Although research studies and management programs are setup in the past few years to enhance resilience with health care 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 pandemic of coronavirus has amplified the need for resilience and adaptability in personal and professional lives. The requirement of 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 leading them to vulnerability. Therefore, the government, health care management, and social policymakers must take radical steps to elucidate new resilient approaches for adaptableness against unforeseen trauma and stress. Modern and innovative interventions and resilience programs should be introduced in social and health care systems.
References
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