Background: Stress and burnout are plaguing critical care nurses across the globe and leading to high levels of turnover. Resilience-building strategies such as mindfulness, self-care, and well-being can help shield nurses from the negative effects of workplace stress. As the first line of defense, nursing schools could provide students with strategies that build resilience; however, little is known about the availability of such resources in nursing education.
Objectives: To determine the prevalence of resources and curricula targeting resilience training and stress reduction at nursing schools across the United States.
Methods: Raters analyzed publicly available college/ university websites and course catalogs of a sample of nursing schools in the United States to determine the availability of resilience resources and curricula.
Results: None of the schools surveyed regularly screened their students for burnout syndrome, and only 9% of schools had a formal curriculum that included resilience training.
Conclusions: Training in practices to build resilience and prevent burnout is essentially absent from accredited nursing schools. This highlights an important opportunity to modify existing curricula to include preventative strategies-such as developing positive coping skills- that could mitigate symptoms of workplace stress in future generations of nurses.
©2020 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.