Yvonne Sawbridge
University of Birmingham, UK
Title: Nursing is hard emotional labor-time to care for the carers?
Biography
Biography: Yvonne Sawbridge
Abstract
Poor nursing care has been the subject of considerable debate in the UK following The Francis report which provided a stark account of poor care in a large NHS Hospital. There were many factors that contributed to this organizational failure. One aspect that is often overlooked is the need to care for staff despite the growing evidence base. West (2012) stated “When we care for staff, they can fulfill their calling of providing outstanding professional care for patients”. Nursing involves emotional work and the concept of emotional labor provides a means of making this element of caring more visible and enables appropriate action to be taken to mitigate against the negative impact of unsupported emotional laborers. The challenges associated with implementing support systems were identified by two action research studies in a range of organizations. Based on this experience and the evidence relating to other approaches an ‘Improvement Lab’ method was utilized, as service improvement methodologies. Key stakeholders were invited to a workshop and provided with an introduction to and the evidence behind a number of existing support systems, to help them decide which would have the best ‘fit’ for their organization. The process enables them to develop a deeper understanding of the various models of support, and then consider how they might begin to implement this in their organization. This paper will present an analysis of the process, and make recommendations for nursing management, focused on how organizations can better support nursing staff in practice.