Hi there. I was hoping maybe you could do it on horizontal workplace bullying between labor and postpartum units or improving self – care “care for yourself so you can care for others…”, or maybe stress? I feel like everyone will write about short staffing so I would rather it not be about that.

Classical Arguement-Sample Solution

Classical Argument: Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing

Introduction

The healthcare environment is challenging and pressuring for nurses, impacting their health and well-being. Nurses have in-depth knowledge regarding health-promoting behaviors and practices, but they continue to report high overweight and obesity levels and mental health issues. Contributing factors include work-related stress, heavy workloads, shift work, poor engagement and communication, increasing patient health demands, and working overtime, leaving nurses with little time to practice self-care. Not practicing self-care is linked to unhealthy nurses, physically and psychologically, which negatively impacts nursing practice and patient outcomes. It is also related to health-risk behaviors like excessive alcohol consumption, smoking, and substance use. Health-promoting self-care impacts nurses’ health and well-being, nursing practice, and overall institutional and patient outcomes, and adopting self-care strategies such as emotional regulation, self-compassion, mindfulness, healthy eating patterns, regular physical activity, staying connected, and continues individual and professional growth would help minimize the negative effects of poor health-promoting self-care. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Background

Self-care is related to any intentional or deliberate effort to activity to cater for one’s mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. Nurses spend extended periods caring for others, and they can forget about themselves, which is detrimental to their and other people’s health (Ross et al., 2019). The American Nurses Association completed a survey that indicated the increased urgency to improve nurses’ health, especially in areas of nutrition, safety, life quality, and physical activity. About 70% of the nurses surveyed admitted to prioritizing patients’ needs, safety, health, and wellness before theirs (Purdue University Global, 2021). Also, 77% of the nurses reported being at a significant risk level for work-related stress (Purdue University Global, 2021). To care for others, nurses should first care for themselves because compassion fatigue is associated with poor health-promoting self-care. Nurses’ health impact patient care in all healthcare settings.

The nursing field can be traumatic for nurses because of increased exposure to trauma, suffering, and pain, ending up traumatized without realizing it most of the time. The Code of Ethics recognizes self-care as a nurse’s responsibility because when nurses are not caring for themselves, they cannot care for their patients (Purdue University Global, 2021). The American Nurses Association Code of Ethics posits that nurses should extend to themselves the moral respect they extend to others, and nurses owe themselves the same duty they owe to other individuals (Purdue University Global, 2021). Regarding self-care, it is a nurse’s responsibility to promote their health and safety, preserve their character and integrity’s wholeness, maintain competence, and ensure personal and professional growth through continuing education and training. Self-care is considered a self-management tool for nurses to reduce the stress from working in the healthcare environment. Lack of self-care is linked with burnout, poor physical and mental health, depression, weight gain or extreme weight loss, unhealthy eating patterns, demoralization, back injury, and reduced job satisfaction (Williams et al., 2022). More attention is needed to enhance self-care in nurses because self-care helps minimize stress, replenish nurses’ compassion capacity and ability to care for others and improve the quality of care.   (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Self-Care Minimizes Stress

Self-care serves as a stress management tool, helping nurses reduce work-related stress. Adopting self-care practices like mindfulness, self-compassion, and emotional regulation can help nurses reduce stress and attend to their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Nurses should perceive self-care as integral to preventative care. Although individual factors can impact an individual’s ability to cope, control themselves, tolerate uncertainties, and resilience, self-care helps acquire and sustain these positive aspects of life. Per Hofmeyer et al. (2020), control is critical to an individual’s well-being, but work-related factors beyond a nurse’s control can disrupt the power to self-regulate and the need for control, adding to work-related stress.

Self-care begins with self-awareness, which is the ability to understand how difficult events, uncertainties, and powerlessness impact oneself. For instance, it is normal to feel anxious, sad, and grief in difficult situations or in a crisis, begging individuals to accept their vulnerability, learn, and understand how to self-regulate to control emotions and feelings attached to such situations. Self-regulation, self-compassion, and mindfulness allow nurses to focus on the positives rather than the negatives and uncertainties, accept situations, especially those that cannot be changed, like the death of a patient, and find meaningful ways to cope in the nursing environment, which helps reduce stress (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Self-care builds resilience, which helps nurses manage stress and maintain their health and well-being and respond appropriately and effectively when facing crisis situations and uncertainties. Self-efficacy, mindfulness, and emotional regulation strengthen psychological resilience. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Self-Care Replenishes Nurses’ Compassion Capacity and Ability to Care for Others

Per the ANA Code of Ethics, nurses should extend to themselves the moral respect they extend to others, and nurses owe themselves the same duty they owe to others. Poor health-promoting self-care is associated with burnout and compassion fatigue, leading to poor patient outcomes and the risk of medical errors. Nursing care relies on empathy and compassion, and the more burned out or stressed a nurse is, the more their capacity to offer empathy and compassion suffers (Monroe et al., 2021). Nurses pour empathy and compassion into their patients daily without a chance of replenishing them. Nurses should learn and have the opportunity to extend empathy and compassion to themselves because not investing in themselves puts their and patients’ health and well-being at risk.

Nurses tend to be difficult on themselves when they make a mistake, and they do not console themselves or talk to themselves as they would talk to a patient or a friend. Nurses are overly critical and judgmental of themselves, which, according to Hofmeyer et al. (2020), stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, activating a stress response that is harmful to an individual’s health and well-being. Engaging in self-care strategies, including having enough sleep, healthy eating patterns, regular physical activity, mindfulness, and social connections can help replenish nurses’ compassion capacity and ability to care for others. Nurses must practice self-compassion and understand their needs before helping others. Nurses should learn to talk kindly to themselves because kind self-talk is linked to increased compassion capacity and pro-social behaviors like kindness, empathy, and altruism, helping them communicate better with colleagues, patients, and their families (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Acting with kindness and compassion helps reduce patient suffering and distress. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Self-Care Improves the Quality and Safety of Care

Nurses caring for themselves and bringing the effects to the workplace helps promote safe and high-quality care. Nurses with self-compassion have better physical and psychological health, motivation, happiness, relationship-building, and perspective-taking, which are linked to better health outcomes (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Self-compassionate nurses report decreased anxiety, depressive symptoms, fear of failure, shame, and rumination, implying a greater capacity to work for others. Stressed, burned out, overwhelmed, and unsatisfied nurses are more likely to be involved in medical errors, including medication administration errors that negatively impact the quality of care and patient safety (Hofmeyer et al., 2020). Adopting self-care strategies like seeking a therapist’s support, taking breaks, engaging colleagues to stay connected, and maintaining physical activity can help reduce burnout, stress, and feeling confused, overwhelmed, frustrated, and angry, increasing nurses’ capacity to promote quality and safe care. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Opposition and Refutation

The opposing argument is that self-care is more dependent on individual factors such as personality, attitudes, beliefs and behavior than environmental factors like those experienced in the healthcare settings. The argument provides that it is impossible to improve self-care by merely improving work-related factors if an individual’s beliefs, attitude, and personality do not conform to self-care strategies. For instance, people have poor attitudes towards healthy eating, exercising regularly, connecting with people, and practicing emotional regulation or mindfulness. For such individuals, it is difficult to enhance self-care behavior by merely reducing workload, increasing engagement, and better shift management. According to this argument, motivation for self-care is more intrinsic. However, most research studies perceive self-care as multifaceted and impacted by multiple factors, external and internal, indicating significant impacts of the nursing environment on self-care behavior and practices (Hofmeyer et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2022, Ross et al., 2019; Monroe et al., 2021). An environment with longer working hours, heavier workloads, poor staff engagement, and less leadership support and motivation would limit nurses’ motivation and capacity to self-care. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

Conclusion

Health-promoting self-care can help improve nurses’ health and well-being, reduce stress, replenish nurses’ compassion capacity and ability to care for others and improve the quality and safety of care. Poor health-promoting self-care is associated with increased nurses’ stress, burnout, lack of job satisfaction, compassion fatigue, chances of making medical errors, and decreased motivation. Nurses can adopt self-care strategies, including mindfulness, emotional regulation, self-compassion, regular physical activity, healthy eating patterns, personal and professional growth, and maintaining connectivity to promote their health and well-being. Self-care is multifaceted, and improving self-care should address both intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. (Health-Promoting Self-Care in Nursing-Essay)

References

Hofmeyer, A., Taylor, R., & Kennedy, K. (2020). Knowledge for nurses to better care for themselves so they can better care for others during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Nurse education today, 94, 104503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2020.104503

Monroe, C., Loresto, F., Horton-Deutsch, S., Kleiner, C., Eron, K., Varney, R., & Grimm, S. (2021). The value of intentional self-care practices: The effects of mindfulness on improving job satisfaction, teamwork, and workplace environments. Archives of psychiatric nursing, 35(2), 189–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnu.2020.10.003

Purdue University Global. (2021, April 28). The importance of self-care for nurses and how to put a plan in place. https://www.purdueglobal.edu/nursing/self-care-for-nurses/

Ross, A., Yang, L., Wehrlen, L., Perez, A., Farmer, N., & Bevans, M. (2019). Nurses and health-promoting self-care: Do we practice what we preach?. Journal of nursing management, 27(3), 599–608. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12718

Williams, S. G., Fruh, S., Barinas, J. L., & Graves, R. J. (2022). Self-Care in Nurses. Journal of radiology nursing, 41(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jradnu.2021.11.001