Building Resilience in the Inpatient Psychiatric Unit and Beyond
The inpatient psychiatric unit ( IPU ) within the Children ’ s Hospital Colorado Pediatric Mental Health Institute ( PMHI ) entered the summer of 2021 having faced significant challenges , including a drastic shift toward more highly dysregulated patients with psychiatric disorders , increased assaults on staff , changes in leadership and high staff turnover . The team recognized this as an opportunity to seek solutions and create a new chapter . That was the push behind the IPU ’ s decision to use the Resilience @ Work framework to better understand the team ’ s strengths and areas for improvement .
Patrick Loney , MBA , BSN , RN , director of patient care services , PMHI , initiated this resiliency response work by partnering with Heather Fitzgerald , DBe , RN , HEC-C , director of resilience , ethics and wellness . Recognizing the importance of engaging direct-care providers in shifting the culture , Loney and Fitzgerald empowered the IPU Governance Council to lead this endeavor in collaboration with the Ethics , Resiliency and Well-being team . This partnership involved , first , educating IPU leadership and the Governance Council about the Resilience @ Work framework and then developing and executing the implementation plan .
In July 2021 , 35 team members took the Resilience @ Work “ team scale ” questionnaire , and in October , the implementation team held hybrid in-person and virtual feedback sessions to process the results . Despite the critical challenges the team experienced , the results demonstrated tremendous strength across all seven dimensions of team resilience . The results also helped the team identify several strengths that will endure them through very challenging times and characteristics to leverage in developing the next chapter , including :
• Creating shared purpose and meaning
• Having shared goals and workload
• Sharing values and trusting each other to do what is expected
• Looking for and building on what works well
• Cooperating and supporting each other to get the job done
This report has been a critical guide to the team ’ s leadership as they seek to finetune plans to foster the team ’ s resiliency . The new awareness this work created around the team ’ s strengths and gaps has been very valuable through recent rollouts of new critical clinical and safety initiatives . The team is now exploring the feasibility and benefit of revisiting the Resilience @ Work scales in 2022 to assess how initiatives implemented over the year have directly impacted the team ’ s resiliency .
PATRICK LONEY , MBA , BSN , RN
Director of Patient Care Services , PMHI
HEATHER FITZGERALD , DBE , RN , HEC-C
Director of Resilience , Ethics and Wellness
20 People