Date of Graduation

5-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Nursing

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Nursing

Advisor/Mentor

Patton, Susan

Committee Member/Reader

Smith-Blair, Nancy J.

Committee Member/Second Reader

Teal, Tabitha

Abstract

In a caring profession like nursing, the risk of sending newly-graduated nurses with low resilience into the workplace provided impetus for the study to explore the association between demographic, work environment and resilience characteristics among registered nurses employed in acute care setting. Select subscales from the PES-NWI were used to assess Nurse Manager Ability, Leadership and Support of Nurses; Staffing and Resource Adequacy; and Collegial Nurse-Physician Relations (Lake, 2002) and the Resilience Scale was used to measure resilience (Wagnild & Young, 1993). Intent to stay was measured by McCain’s Behavioral Commitment Scale (McCloskey, 1990). One-hundred and thirteen (113) registered nurses completed and returned the survey, giving a response rate of 50.2%. Using SPSS 24 (IBM Corp., 2013) software, descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. The p-value for all comparisons was set at p≤0.05. Five (5) out of the twenty-one (21) correlations were statistically significant and were greater than or equal to .33. Resilience scores and Behavioral Commitment scores, or intent-to-stay, had a correlation of only .069. Adequate Staffing was also correlated to positive Nurse-physician relationships and to strong Nurse Management. These factors are clearly related to creating a stable workforce among nurses. The results showed that no factor had strong correlation with the highest level of nursing education received, suggesting that, at this hospital, registered nurses prepared by a four-year degree had no higher or lower resilience and were no more or less likely to stay at their place of work than those who were prepared at the associate degree level. Findings from this study have the potential to mitigate practice work environment stressors and decrease turnover among registered nurses employed in acute care settings.

Keywords

Nursing; Resilience; Work Environment; Intent to Stay; Commitment

Included in

Nursing Commons

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