Resilience for Health Care Consumers and Health Professionals Solution

Resilience for Health Care Consumers and Health Professionals Solution

Introduction

Mary Holloway has aptly said “Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and the responsibility to pick up yourself”. Patience, Staying Power, Ability to bounce back speaks about tough people during tough situations. The entire human journey is all about rising up and moving ahead , it is all about dealing with hardships and how people don’t give up. This essay aims at discussing the concept of resilience. Secondly, it talks about the factors that contribute to resilience for health care consumers and health professionals. Finally, it will relate resilience with the health care sector.

Body

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances so that it can sustain required operations , even after a major mishap or in the presence of continuous stress is known as resilience (Nemeth 20111). Gill Windle of Cambridge University examined the concept of resilience throughout a lifespan and has formulated a methodological approach that enables the identification of resilient factors at particular stages in a persons’ life. It revolves around understanding and applying human factors in health care provides significant opportunities for improving patient safety. It investigates how individuals, teams and organizations monitor adapt to and act on failure in high risk situations (S A Jeffcott,2009).

Resilience is seen as a quality present in a person which pushes, stretches him to act, perform in a specific situation where things go far beyond control. Few other sectors are the aviation and defense sector.  It enables the health care system to conduct to settle in and familiarize them to base a tough response to the unexpected, sudden and out of the blue situation. Resilience not only lies within the healthcare providers but also with the receivers of the service. The behavioral factors of the people associated with the healthcare organization are properly honed to fill the breach. If one wishes to define the dictionary meaning of the word resilience , it is synonymous with robust, flexible, buoyant. It portrays a person’s quality and ability to come back from illness or depression or some other adversity in life. When structures are compared it is power of a material to return to its original form after putting under physical stress.(. S A Jeffcott, 2009). For example gold, it is melted so that it can be given the shape of an ornament. Similarly people who have the will-power to fight back in extreme situations are known as resilient.

Resilience is required in very high risk organizations.  The reason is they should know how hazards are avoided and safety is assured. One such sector is the health care where both the consumers and providers need to be resilient. Providers are at very high risk because at the end of the end it is the life of the consumers that is at stake and consumers need to be resilient because they undergo lot of pain and discomfort and always under stress because of the fear of losing their lives. A lot of factors determine a person’s level of resilience. It is attributed to a range of factors. Those factors can be adversity, protective factors, risk factors and cognitive coping strategies (Knight 2007). These factors are basically divided into internal factors and external factors. Internal factors include biological and psychological things like general health, genetic predisposition, temperature, intelligence, personality and cognitive style. According to a study conducted by Goldsetin, Faulkner and Wekerle determined that internal factors such as empathetic personality traits, average or above average intellectual ability and general good health contributed to a high level of resilience in addition to a decrease in susceptibility to mental illness such as depression. Few other factors contributing to a person’s level of resilience are openness, curiosity, acceptance, secured relationship, love and support the cognitive ability to respond rather than react to diversity. Siegel and Bryson (2011). These traits are developed and skewed by environmental factors such as community, family life thus having a direct impact on the progression of the resilience behavior (Kulkarn, Kennedy and Lewis 2010).

There are three stages of Resilience and they are as follows

1. Reactive:In this stage it indicates that the team or organizations are ready for any kind of response to failure or the counterparts are present to take care of the situation.
2. Interactive:It is the middle stage where attention to failure in not anticipated. It is more because of lack of foresight.
3. Proactive: It is a state of full preparedness where additional attention is given.

??Health care professional undergo high level of stress. For example emergency calls in the case of a cardiologist affects the personal life of the doctors. Conducting surgeries keep them emotionally tensed which they cannot afford to show. Job satisfaction decreases due to very high level of stress.20% Medical residents report below average mental health which is double the general population of the same age.The level of stress remains the same throughout as a result of which it directly or indirectly affects the quality of health care they provide to the patients.

Next, when we talk about the health care consumers and resilience, it shares a different picture. People are so fond of their lives that they can go up to any extent to increase their life span. They consider doctors are representatives of Gods. They invest hope in all the available lines of treatments homeopathy, naturopathy and allopath. They look for sympathy and empathy too. In other words anything that can give them relief from pain, discomfort and uneasy feeling. The consumers feel emotional, psychological, physical pain and financial load too. Their family members go through the same.

Conclusion

To conclude with resilience is needed to save lives. Both health care providers and consumers need to realize this. The entire energy and focus should shift to reducing the errors. Improving health care safety means diversifying the scope of research in this area. Resilience is an upcoming concept and needs to be addressed. This fits in the complexities, uncertainties and dynamics of health care sector more than hollow concepts like reliability and confidence. Patients should not be seen as mere pathological feature but as an entity who demands to be safe.( S A Jeffcott, J E Ibrahim, P A Cameron). A humane touch will bring in a difference in the health care sector.
 

References
 

Jeffcott, S., Ibrahim, J., & Cameron, P. (2009). Resilience in healthcare and clinical handover. Quality And Safety In Health Care, 18(4), 256-260
Kulkarni, S., Kennedy, A., & Lewis, C. (2010). Using a Risk and Resilience Framework and Feminist Theory to Guide Social Work Interventions with Adolescent Mothers. Families In Society: The Journal Of Contemporary Social Services, 91(3), 217-224.
Nemeth, C., Wears, R., Patel, S., Rosen, G., & Cook, R. (2011). Resilience is not control: healthcare, crisis management, and ICT. Cognition, Technology & Work, 13(3), 189-202.
Knight, C. (2007). A resilience framework: perspectives for educators. Health Education, 107(6), 543-555.
Goldstein, A., Faulkner, B., & Wekerle, C. (2013). The relationship among internal resilience, smoking, alcohol use, and depression symptoms in emerging adults transitioning out of child welfare. Child Abuse & Neglect, 37(1), 22-32
Siegel, D. & Bryson, T. (2013). The whole-brain child. New York: Delacorte Press.