Self-Care Concept to Nurses Overview Assignment Paper

Nurses’ Barriers to Self-Care

A healthy nursing workforce is a global priority, leading to positive patient outcomes. Hence, there is a need for healthcare organization management to assess better ways to promote the nursing workforce’s self-care strategies. Generally, as defined by the World Health Organization, self-care is the ability of persons, their families, and the entire community to enhance health, maintain health, prevent diseases, and manage diseases and disabilities independently or through the healthcare providers’ assistance. Nurses’ self-care has the same definition and occurs when the nurses formulate and implement individual efforts to promote, achieve, and maintain emotional, mental, and physical health. However, there are a variety of barriers that hinder nurses from achieving their self-care. The paper will explore nurses’ barriers to self-care.

Self-Care Concept to Nurses Overview     

Self-care for nurses is a concept that the Code of Ethics formulated by the American Nurses Association (ANA) emphasizes. The ANA code provision states that nurses should acknowledge and extend moral respect to themselves as they extend it to other people surrounding them (Green, 2019). Such moral respect includes enhancing health and safety, integrity and character wholeness preservation, maintaining competence, and continuing with their professional and personal growth. The main reasons nurses need to focus on self-care are aligned with stress management, promoting workplace safety, providing high-quality patient care, improving productivity, and preventing different health-related conditions such as depression to avoid these illnesses’ adverse effects (Green, 2019).

The self-care concept has also been theorized by Dorothea Orem, who defines the concept as the activities that an individual initiates and performs to maintain health, life, and well-being. Just like Orem proposes that nurses need to guide the patients in re-establishing their capacity towards healthcare, healthcare organizations should also assess effective ways to help nurses with an environment that promotes self-care (Tanaka, 2022). That is because once the nurses achieve self-care, they will transition such positive outcomes into improving the overall patient outcomes and organizational performance. However, healthcare organizations can achieve it through promoting effective leadership skills, such as transformational and charismatic leadership skills, that increase interaction between the nursing workforce and the nurse managers.

Barriers to Nurses’ Self-care

The main barriers nurses encounter that may impact how they conduct self-care include shift rotations and multitasking, which limits them from achieving optimal self-care. According to Ross et al. (2019), self-care must be a priority for nurses since it can help ease stress’s detrimental effects in the rapidly and constantly changing healthcare environment. That is because it helps prevent burnout and high nurse turnover rates, which can lead to devastating consequences for the nurses, patient populations, and healthcare organizations. For instance, a study by Chiang et al. (2022) shows that rotating shifts exposes nurses’  to higher risk of cancer-related mortality and cardiovascular diseases. These problems are primarily associated with perceived stress and lifestyle patterns like inappropriate dietary behaviors and lack of physical activities. The research by Ross et al. (2019) also shows that rotational shifts have contradictory health outcomes, including changing the nurse’s sleep patterns, which may affect their personal and professional growth due to poor productivity. Multitasking limits the nurses’ time to focus on personal growth and care despite increasing chances for healthcare organizations to manage their resources. Such an instance leads to increased errors and performance issues, thus affecting the nurse’s and patient satisfaction level and the organization’s performance.

Ways to Enhance Nurses’ Self-Care

Some ways the nurses can enhance their self-care practices revolve around psychological, physical, and social contexts. The psychological self-care context helps nurses focus on people and things within their influence sphere, which they can easily control regardless of their work environment. Psychological self-care is beneficial to nurses since it provides them with opportunities to reflect on essential matters to ease their minds and increase focus (Chiang et al., 2022). Some activities that can enhance nurse psychological self-care include meditation and engaging in a digital detox where one limits time spent on digital space, particularly watching television and social media, and dedicating that time to personal reflection.

Physical self-care for nurses focuses on their need to take maximum care of their body’s physical needs, like watching their daily activities, sleep patterns, and eating habits. Physical self-care is necessary, considering nurses use most of their time moving patients and standing for long hours (Ross et al., 2019). Nurses can enhance their physical self-care by getting adequate sleep, exercising regularly,  and sticking to a balanced diet since these activities promote their emotional stability and mental focus. Also, a social self-care context is necessary since it enables nurses to maintain healthy relationships, helps reduce anxiety, and promotes self-esteem. Nurses can enhance their social self-care by nurturing healthy relationships with friends and family members and maintaining them as their support system (Chiang et al., 2022). Also, it is necessary to set relationship boundaries to maintain balance during social interactions.

Conclusion

Self-care context is necessary for nurses since they must prioritize their well-being and enhance positive patient outcomes. That is why ANA, through its Code of Ethics and nursing theorist Dorothea Orem, emphasizes nurses’ need to focus on self-care. Some of the barriers surrounding nurses’ self-care are shift rotation and multitasking. However, nurses can achieve optimal self-care by focusing on psychological, social, and physical self-care.

References

Chiang, S.-L., Chiang, L.-C., Tzeng, W.-C., Lee, M.-S., Fang, C.-C., Lin, C.-H., & Lin, C.-H. (2022). Impact of Rotating Shifts on Lifestyle Patterns and Perceived Stress among Nurses: A Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(9), 5235. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095235

Green, C. (2019). Teaching accelerated nursing students’ self‐care: A pilot project. Nursing Open, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.384

Ross, A., Touchton-Leonard, K., Perez, A., Wehrlen, L., Kazmi, N., & Gibbons, S. (2019). Factors That Influence Health-Promoting Self-care in Registered Nurses. Advances in Nursing Science, 42(4), 1. https://doi.org/10.1097/ans.0000000000000274

Tanaka, M. (2022). Orem’s nursing self‐care deficit theory: A theoretical analysis focusing on its philosophical and sociological foundation. Nursing Forum, 57(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/nuf.12696