Promoting Nurse Well-Being during a Global Pandemic through the Community Resiliency Model

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started a few years ago, there has been an increase in mental health issues due to the chronic emotional, physical, and psychological stress that everyone has had to endure. COVID-19 has had long-lasting consequences on the entire healthcare system, especially with nurses as the foundation for providing quality patient care. While nurses are the trusted professionals, they also have one of the most emotionally and physically demanding careers (Ward-Miller et al., 2020). In addition, there is a global health crisis of nursing shortages that continues to grow through COVID-19, which directly affects patients’ quality of care and outcomes. The Community Resiliency Model (CRM) is a sensory awareness program that utilizes mindfulness and tracking of internal body sensations to encourage more adaptative neural pathways (Miller-Karas, 2015). This project aimed to teach CRM to a group of nurses who worked throughout COVID-19 to increase overall well-being potentially. The CRM intervention was a 3-hour combined lecture and group activities learning modality. Two validated screening tools, the WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5) and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) were administered to participants at three-time points to measure overall well-being. There were no clinically significant differences in mean wellness scores across all time points. With CRM still being a younger therapeutic modality, this project demonstrated the potential for expanding CRM utilization to increase mental health awareness and develop resilience skills for nurses to create positive cascading effects throughout the healthcare system.

Keywords: nurse, well-being, resilience, Community Resiliency Model (CRM)