A 3-Point Strategy to Help Strengthen Nurse Resiliency

by Rhonda Collins, DNP, RN, FAAN

Topics Covered:

Enabling Safety and Quality Care

May, 2020

Each May, I write a CNO Perspective report on a topic that’s top of mind for nurse leaders. Last year, I wrote about reducing cognitive load for nurses and other healthcare professionals. I’ve spent the past year speaking and publishing on this topic, and the response I’ve continued to receive tells me the theme remains important and timely.

In watching the toll COVID-19 has taken on healthcare workers, I realize that cognitive burden is even more of an issue now than it was before the pandemic. The mental and physical burden nurses must carry in this time of need is life altering for them. For this reason, I decided to devote this year’s CNO Perspective report to outlining a strategy to help strengthen nurses’ resiliency. I encourage you to read my 2020 CNO Perspective report, “Nurses Have Stepped Up. Now It’s Time to Support Them as We Move Forward.”

The report presents a short review of cognitive capacity theory, with a focus on four of its eight skills or executive functions¹: Multiple simultaneous attention, working memory, category formation, and pattern recognition. It examines how these executive functions tie to the cognitive burden nurses have carried in coping with the pressures of patient care in the face of COVID-19. It looks at how clinical leaders can leverage communication technology designed to simplify clinical workflows to help build nurses’ resiliency.

3-Point Strategy to Help Strengthen Nurses’ Resiliency

The report outlines a three-point strategy for how principles of cognitive science can be applied in the patient-care environment. Following is a high-level summary of the three elements.

1. Address the Strategic Delta Between Documentation and Communication

With patient surges from a crisis like COVID-19, caregivers move through the hospital trying to manage critically ill patients at warp speed, and the patients just keep coming. A key lesson here is that care teams are mobile, and information must be, too. Documentation and communication must work together to relieve clinicians’ cognitive burden.

2. Give Clinicians Control Over How They Communicate

The stresses of responding to COVID-19 have made it clear that hospitals need to empower nurses to control the way they communicate. We must remove from nurses the burden of constantly having to adapt to varied preferences. No nurse should have to ask, “Does this doctor want to be paged? Does the other one demand I go through the answering service? How do I call the department I need to reach?” Although nurses and physicians communicate differently, hospitals and health systems should standardize communication using the same software, so nurses don’t have to work in and out of disparate systems.

3. Use Software to Enhance Workflow, Not Distract from It

The intensity of COVID-19 clinical workflow has demonstrated that clinicians need clear, contextual, just-in-time information. There is no time to be searching for information or struggling to communicate. Information must be pushed to the healthcare team on the go. Nurses don’t have time to search through complex fields of information when they are under such pressure. Efficient clinical workflow requires purposeful communication and meaningful information centered around the patient.

Looking Forward

Now is the time to make plans for how to support healthcare workers who are trauma survivors and will likely experience PTSD for a while to come. What protocols and resources can be put into place to ensure we don’t run out of supplies or unintentionally spread infectious disease? How do we ensure that communication, which is the very backbone of patient care and safety, is considered an essential part of PPE and no longer an afterthought or tacked onto another system?

We helped our customers rapidly expand their deployments of our communication platform to prepare for impending patient surges. We supported them to implement innovations they devised for using our technology to allow care teams and patients to stay safe and connected and aid nurse resiliency. It is clear to us that new standards are forming for hospitals to optimize clinical communication strategies to help reduce the spread of infectious disease and improve safety.

Some hospitals will continue to manage in crisis mode for some time. Others are seeing a break or slowing in the stream of patients. We don’t know for sure what the future holds. But what we can do is define what is essential, ease the burden when we can, and use the lessons learned to plan for future crises that impact and strain our healthcare system.

Download the 2020 CNO Perspective report, “Nurses Have Stepped Up. Now It’s Time to Support Them as We Move Forward” here.

Our teams at Vocera are here to help, and I want to hear from you. I welcome you to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter @rhondacno.