These CPD activities for occupational health practitioners are designed to complement Elly Dady’s CPD article Resilience – the essentials for OH nurses.
Activity 1
Do we reflect enough on our own resilience as OH practitioners and leaders? Identify your own level of resilience by completing the Robertson Cooper resilience online questionnaire.
What does the feedback tell you about your own resilience. Were there any surprises in your results?
How do you know when your resilience is low and what supports your resilience at work?
What interventions have you experienced in your work that enhance your personal resilience?
Activity 2
Reflect on how you support the resilience of colleagues. How do you support a strong social network at work? Do you receive regular feedback on your role as a practitioner and/or manager? If not, how could you encourage your organisation to support feedback from colleagues? If you do receive such feedback, how do you react if it is not all positive? How might you frame recent adverse experiences in a more positive light?
Activity 3
Read the HSE management standards framework and resources for managing stress at work.
Are any of the elements referred to by the HSE controlled better than others in your immediate work context?
Activity 4
Read through this NHS England resource, which aims to support medical practitioners. It provides eight principles for being a resilient doctor; the principles are transferrable and can be applied to other professionals including nurses.
Activity 5
Watch the following TED talks and YouTube videos.
George Bonanno: Measuring human resilience – George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology, mines massive data sets to discover how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity.
Raphael Rose: How failure cultivates resilience – In his research for NASA, occupational psychologist Raphael Rose discovered that failure is key to creating resilience. Reflect on how this talk relates to occupational health nursing practice.
David Donaldson: Resilience, the up side of down – A simplified look at how the brain works.
Denise Mai: How to build resilience as your superpower – Denise looks at how resilience can be a superpower.
Paul Jenkins: Pathological Positivity: How To Be Positive No Matter What – Resilience after accidents leading to life changing circumstances
Chris Khouri: Positivity in the hardest moments can make the difference – Chris, an inspirational paralympian, speaks of his experiences after he became paraplegic following a mid-air collision which killed his father and left him with a spinal injury and a wheelchair user
Further reading
Ackerman, C (2020) How To Measure Resilience With These 8 Resilience Scales – An article covering a range of tools to assess resilience.
Bonnano, G. (2004) Loss trauma and resilience- how we have under estimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy; Vol S, No1, pp.101-113. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20
Chowdhury, M (2022) What is emotional resilience and how to build it.
The Connor Davidson resilience scale
Gonzalez, S., Moore, E., Newton, M., & Galli, N. (2015). Validity and reliability of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) in competitive sport
Hoegl, M., Hartmann, S. (2021) Bouncing back, if not beyond: Challenges for research on resilience. Asian Bus Manage 20, 456–464
