Title : Building a resilience ecosystem to improve employee mental health and well-being
Abstract:
The present health care model and research funding direction focus for mental health and well-being of employees is on diagnosis and treatment of illness and injury once symptoms are present, downstream from the actual onset. Much less attention paid to mitigation strategies reaching upstream building resilience prior to a problem. While “preventing” an injury or illness is near impossible (and hence a poor term), learning a suite of mitigation strategies may build one’s resilience to illness and injury. Resilience is an evolving concept, and the word is used in many contexts. Today we look towards a reconfiguration wherein new skills and strengths are developed in response to adversity that offers some protection from further such events, often captured in words like posttraumatic growth. This modern concept of resilience extends beyond individual personality traits and involves behaviours, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed. Within this framework, the onus has been on the worker who is exposed, and their personal skills brought to each situation to avoid stress injury. This notion of resilience has been criticized in literature as it seems to impose self-responsibility on individuals with PTSI for post- traumatic growth. However, in a more holistic ecological approach resilience can be conceptualized at the individual, familial, and community (workplace) levels.
Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: This work reports on a series of investigations and line of research. A series of structured reviews examined mental health disorders, mitigation strategies, coping and resilience in public safety personnel and frontline health care workers. An ecological framework was utilized to focus on the variables that impact resilience to occupational stress injuries.
Findings: New conceptualizations of resilience focus on risk and protective factors emerging through ongoing transactions within networks of individual, familial, and community systems.
Conclusion & Significance: The shift from models emphasizing individual capacities to multi-systemic, contextualized conceptualizations raise awareness that some individuals may not be resilient not because they lack agency, but because they may be disconnected from the supports that ameliorate risk.
Audience Take Away Notes:
- Reflect on conceptualizations of resilience
- Understand an ecological approach to creating resilience that includes the individual, family and workplace
- Describe the importance of mitigation strategies and the desired shift in mindset
- Participants will increase their toolkit to address mental health and wellness in the workplace
