Building resilience in graduates: Addressing horizontal violence in the profession of nursing

Abstract

Resilience and workplace adversity are topics that have been broadly explored by disciplines in the social sciences and humanities and often overlooked in the professional education disciplines. From a pragmatic approach, nursing graduates need to identify, understand, and face the complexity of health care and the high likelihood of workplace adversity as they gain professional experience. In this chapter, resilience is reviewed from a critical perspective in order to foster a deeper understanding of the need to empower baccalaureate nursing students through their entry into practice. This chapter will present the nature of resilience as a requirement for nurses facing adversity and having to adapt to the complexity of nursing practice. The personal traits of resilience and the potential it presents to empower nurses to achieve job satisfaction, good health, and well-being are outlined.