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Building personal resilience and coping skills in nursing students

Given the potentially stress-inducing nature of their work, nurses would assuredly benefit from formal training that aims to help these healthcare professionals build personal resilience and positive coping strategies to manage adverse events and mitigate associated negative effects. Drawing from a sample of nursing students (N = 70), a repeated-measures research design was used to explore the effectiveness of a self-paced online resilience training program on improving personal resilience and positive coping styles, while reducing the severity of anxiety- and depression- related symptoms. Findings indicate that scores on the measure of personal resilience significantly improved from baseline to post-training follow-up assessment. While scores on measures of positive coping and anxiety/depression shifted in the expected direction, these findings were not statistically significant. This study presents evidence to suggest that a self-paced psycho-educational tool (i.e., an online resilience training program) may be an effective strategy for improving personal resilience among nursing students.

Principal Applicant: Greg Anderson (Justice Institute of British Columbia)
Co-Applicants: John Collins (Vancouver Community College); Mendy Black (Vancouver Community College); Nona Coles (Vancouver Community College); Adam Vaughan (Justice Institute of British Columbia); R. Nicholas Carleton (University of Regina)
Funding Awarded: $49,612 (Innovation at Work)

Competition Year: 2018 File type: PDF (151 KB) Asset type: Research Research: RS2018-IG32