I’ve been wanting to add a post about this book for a while. Its finished and its recently published by Routledge.
It was nearly ten years ago that I first stumbled on two pieces of writing about resilience. One was a critical article by economist Mark Neocleous, Resisting Resilience. Published in 2013, the author describes how a turn to resilience has embedded itself across military support systems, responses to threats of terrorism, urban planning and self-help advice.
‘Resilience’ [he says] has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it.’
The second piece that I read that morning ten years ago was an editorial in Nursing Standard by Jean Gray, Building Resilience in the Nursing Workforce. At the time I read it as a more or less uncritical encouragement to nurses to become more resilient in the face of a range of workplace pressures but a more careful re-reading shows that Jean was well aware of the combination of ‘adversities’ that nurses face, those inherent in the work itself and those that are the effect of policy and funding decisions. But for Jean’s cautious article, there are probably a hundred that enthusiastically promote resilience training as a solution a host of entrenched workplace problems. Their message, to put it bluntly, is that systems are far too difficult to change, so nurses should change the way they think instead. Despite the claims that evaluations show that an afternoon of resilience training can reduce intention to leave among nurses, I suggest that this approach adds to many nurses’ sense that their managers are not serious, or do not have the power, regarding improving working conditions. The imperative for nurses to learn to be more resilient is often received by nurses as insulting.
Neocleous, and many others, describe system resilience initiatives and concerns alongside the way that the concept of resilience has emerged within positive psychology and self-help. Despite the optimistic twist that politicians have found attractive and useful, I find the positive psychology movement problematic. Perhaps the main reason is its disregard for material conditions and there are strong elements of this thinking in resilience research. For instance, one study of resilience among nurses working in the Philippines during COVID found that they were highly anxious about the poor provision of protective equipment and of becoming infected. The researchers recommended not that the supply of PPE be urgently improved but that managers support nurses to not feel so anxious and to develop positive coping strategies (Labrague and de Los Santos, 2020).
My book lists some of the nurses that died after contracting COVID in the UK – and of course many more died worldwide. I suggest that resilience is of no use to these nurses. In the book I also report on signs that in policy and professional communities there is now a fundamental scepticism about this individualised version of resilience and an acknowledgement that it is a totally inadequate concept if we want to understand and improve health systems.
You can find more details about the book, Nursing, COVID and the End of Resilience here:
Labrague LJ and Santos JAA (2020) COVID‐19 anxiety among front‐line nurses: Predictive role of organisational support, personal resilience and social support. Journal of Nursing Management 28(7): 1653-1661.
