Perceptions of resilience among baccalaureate nursing students

The phenomenon of resilience has recently gained recognition as being essential to the professional nurse. Nurses work in a chaotic, stressful, and ever-changing healthcare work environment and benefit from being resilient. Nurse scholars have suggested that the promotion of resilience should begin in nursing education. However, there is a dearth of literature regarding resilience in nursing students and more specifically, understanding the student perspective of resilience. This understanding is crucial for faculty to expand their knowledge of resilience in nursing students, to offer support to students facing adversity during their nursing programs and to better prepare nursing students for practice. The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of resilience from the nursing student perspective. The research questions were: (a) How do nursing students define resilience? (b) Do nursing students perceive themselves as resilient? (c) What do nursing students identify as facilitators or barriers to resilience? (d) In what way do students perceive resilience as important to nursing practice? (e) In what way do the findings of this study compare to the pushing through model? (Reyes, Andrusyszyn, Iwasiw, Forchuck & Babenko-Mould, 2015a). Participants included 25 baccalaureate junior and senior level nursing students from a large public university in the northeast. Study data were collected through six, 90 minute online focus groups, each ranging from 2-6 participants. Focus group transcripts were downloaded, reviewed, and analyzed within and across groups using content analysis. Four major themes emerged in relation to how participants define resilience and their perception of their resilience including: (a) Recognizing and Developing Internal Traits, (b) Pushing through Challenges, (c) Bouncing Back Stronger, (d) Focusing on the End Goal. Participants defined resilience as: the ability to push through challenges by drawing on internal traits that can be developed, bouncing back and growing from these challenges and having an end goal to work towards. In addition, it was found that the majority of the participants considered themselves resilient. Participants identified four facilitators that enhanced their resilience: supportive networks, structure of educational offerings, self-care, and transformation. Three barriers that influenced their resilience were identified: imbalance, struggling with self-perception, and barriers within the nursing program. The majority of participants felt that it was important for nurses to be resilient to manage the complex healthcare environment. In addition nurses were viewed as role models of resilience for their patients. Lastly, there were many commonalities between the findings of this study and the pushing through model and a few unique findings not related to the model.Results from this study provide a rich description of resilience from the nursing student perspective. Based on the findings of this study, several implications and recommendations for theory, practice, education, policy, and research are provided.