Essay On Mental Health And Wellbeing

 

Mental health and well-being are a wider concept which is related with the social, financial, emotional and spiritual health of an individual (Mitchell, 2018). As per the World Health Organization (WHO), mental health is a state of higher well-being in every individual who wants to effectively increase their potential and who wants to become more productive in an effective way. For analyzing the ill mental health of an individual there are the following key symptoms such as: depression, fatigue, digestive problems, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, etc (Antonacci, et. al., 2018). Moreover, for nurses and healthcare experts there are certain key factors that can decrease their mental well-being such as: exposure to patients’ unpredictable behavior, patients refusing medication, inadequate facilities, emotional exhaustion, etc (Nasirin & Lionardo, 2020). Moreover, this report will incorporate a reflection about one issue that positively impacted by mental well-being and another issue that negatively impacted my mental well-being. This report will also incorporate a strategy to identify, describe and reflect upon the 2 issues which are described in the report. There are certain five factors of wellbeing such as: physical wellbeing, career wellbeing, community wellbeing, etc (Corno, et. al., 2018).

 

 

I consider myself as a grateful person for get an opportunity to work with my previous employer. In my previous nursing job various nurses reported about increasing stress levels. Our manage conducted a detailed brainstorming session (this session is used for collaborative conversations in which all the team members think for a common issue and its solutions). Our department head effectively tried to understand our concern and then he evaluated that there are numerous factors that had increased our stress levels such as: long-shifts, a high pace, chronicity of care, lack of social support, perceived job security, etc. In this aspect, our department head told us to take an additional 30minutes break for performing meditation in the workplace. He further told us that the additional break for 30minutes will be included in our shift hours. I felt a much relieve and this incident had increased my respect towards our department head.

 

Later on, when I daily performed the meditation in the centre then it effectively increased my work performance. Through this positive decision of my employer, it not only increased my work performance related to the professional life but it also positively impacted my personal life as well.

 

 

Through the decision of our department head for performing daily meditation for 30 minutes made me feel more energetic, it improved my concentration and it also helped me in declutter my thoughts in an effective way. I analysed that meditation put a positive impact on improving my ability for sustaining attention and it decreased my internal distractions. 

 

 

I learnt that it is important for an employer to make sure that he/she should understand the personal as well professional concern of the employees. For my future nursing practice, I am taking a lesson that working in a stressful or challenging environment for long periods of time with little recovery time is a higher risk factor for creating employee burnout. I will make sure that my team members and nursing staff should not develop an unconscious feeling of negativism or cynicism related to the work. It is important for the nurses to focus towards work-life integration related factors (Gander, Proyer & Ruch, 2018).

 

 

In my previous job, there were some negative as well as positive incidents which I had experienced. I had experienced a negative incident which was related with the poor nursing bedside practice. I was assigned to handle a patient who was admitted for the operation of bronchial thermoplasty. I was in the night shift and next morning when my shift got changed had to follow the nursing bedside procedure. In the nursing bedside procedure, we had to report about both oncoming and outgoing nurses for accessing the patients and to examine about the patient safety errors (Greenawalt, Orsega-Smith, Turner, Goodwin & Rathie, 2019). I had translated all the detail about the patient (bedside procedure) to the next nurse but eventually she missed out about the general information which I had shared to her. I told her to give medicine to the patient next morning but she forgets to give medicine and it resultant in causing an adverse impact on the patient’s health. Later on, our department head had scold me for not providing the medicine to the patient on time and I tried to explained him the entire scenario but he refused my justification. This was my one of the negative incidents which was associated with my work (Boga, 2019).

 

 

After this incident of not following adequate patient bedside routine, my department head had scold me in front of all the members. I felt ashamed and I took a long-leaves for 7 consecutive days because I was mentally disturbed after this incident. Apart from this, I still remember that when I was on leave then my colleagues used to call on my number and they had started mocking at me. I also tried to explain them the scenario but they eventually failed to understand my concern. I did not even get a social support while dealing with this adverse incident (González-García, et. al., 2020).

 

 

Anyone can imagine that getting seriously scold for the mistake in front of all the colleague which was never committed by an individual can make anyone mentally distributed. Similarly, I had also experienced the same feeling from this incident (Chinh, et. al., 2021).

 

 

From this incident, I am taking a lesson that I will focus more on developing a strengthen nursing bedside procedure so that the adverse impact on the patients due to the adverse practices can be reduced and improving the bedside nursing procedure will also positively impact the nursing operations (Rose & Chacko, 2019).

 

In the step 2, the issue of nursing bedside procedure and adverse team govern skills are identified. In order to re-solve these strategies, below are the 2 strategies which are suggested:

 

 

It is suggested that to develop peace and less-stress levels I need to focus towards the well-being framework. The framework of well-being incorporate discussion about these major areas which are as follows – emotional/mental health, financial perspective, intellectual health, occupational health, social health and spiritual health. As focusing towards these areas of well-being will effectively help in the overall development of a healthy lifestyle. Mental health is the important area of the well-being plan. To maintain a proper mental health, it is suggested to take use of meditation, yoga and deep-breathing exercise (Cornine, 2020). Although, I noticed that it is difficult for many people to continue giving their time towards yoga and meditation on the consistent bases. This happens because of the brain’s reward and pleasure programs (Schuster & Dwyer, 2020). For example: activities which gives instant rewards effectively made an individual to repeat those activities and areas such as: video games, watching funny videos, etc. On the other hand, activities which do not give instant rewards, the brain keeps postponing those activities. For example: performing yoga and meditation do not give instant reward to an individual in the short-run but an individual should understand that a short-term pain can be beneficial for their future success (Cocchiara et al., 2019).

 

As discussed in the above scenario, the mental health of nurses is affected by workplace stress and depression caused by the clinical scenarios due to the complexities of work. According to Søvold et al. (2021), reducing stress is necessary for mental health and wellbeing, and for this, nurses can follow evidence-based practices. There are different options available for a nurse in a clinical environment that can be used to avoid the risks and stress; for example, seeking help is mostly used by nurses, those new in the practice (Bernburg, Groneberg & Mache, 2019). When working in a complex and challenging situation, nurses are exposed to stress and depression; however, Liu et al. (2021) argue that help from co-workers or family members help nurses to cope with the stressful situation. Family support and peer consultation motivate people and help them develop the confidence to prevent situations that affect their mental wellbeing. For example, when I have doubts or questions, I do not feel ashamed to ask my seniors or supervisor as it would help me to reduce the risk of errors and cope with the jo-related stress, which will further reduce the risk of mental health issues (Fahy & Moran, 2018).

 

 

It has been found that most of the nursing errors or clinical situations associated with stressful events and mental health issues occur due to the lack of knowledge, competencies, and negligence of potential risk factors; however, nurses who are competent and have adequate knowledge to manage those situations are able to cope with stressful events and do not have any impact on their mental health and wellbeing (Dyab et al., 2018). Furthermore, a nurse with adequate knowledge of clinical events could guide other staff nurses about the risks and challenges that can be avoided. In the above-discussed scenario, a problem occurred as I could not communicate effectively with the shift nurse and educate her about the bedside procedure (Isa et al., 2019). Moreover, I was unaware that clinical situations and errors affect patient outcomes. To improve my knowledge regarding contemporary clinical issues, I would read the nursing journals that would help me to improve my knowledge of current nursing issues and help me to implement evidence-based practice to solve the problem. Furthermore, connecting with people or having a network provide a sense of well-being, and allows individuals to learn various skills such as knowing the challenges of others, the nature of people, and how they react to a situation; for example, by joining a network of nurses, I would be able to learn how different people manage a situation, and they support to do when they do not have an experience that can help me to avoid the errors, and communication gap between nurses (Isa et al., 2019).

 

Nursing with a lack of skills and knowledge have fear and are not able to pay attention to little details that lead to big problems. Therefore, learning new skills is essential to paying attention to every detail. Apart from this, hesitation and lack of communication skills are the major problems that create the situations such as miscommunication when nurses are not able to communicate or discuss a situation properly; It is more crucial during the referrals or in the wards when the duties of nurses’ change (Meng & Qi, 2018). Thus, I will focus on my communication skills, interact with more people, and seek for help from others when having any doubts rather than working on assumptions. Clear and effective communication can reduce the risk of errors; for example, AlBashtawy (2020) describes that most nursing errors including medication errors are associated with miscommunication, and nurses are not able to communicate and guide other nurses when their shift is over. To improve my communication in the workplace, I will focus on effective and active listening, interact with more people, improve my body language and utilise different ways of communication such as verbal and non-verbal methods.

 

 

In this report, it is concluded that about my experience in my previous workplace. I experienced a positive incident in which my department head had made a rule for allowing all the nurses as well as physicians for conducing meditation and mindfulness activities for 30 minutes. I also experienced a negative incident which was related with the bedside handover procedure. It is suggested that to overcome the issues of the nursing bedside handover procedure there are strategies that can be implemented by a nurse such as continuous learning, developing skills, communication skills, interacting with more people, and seeking support from co-workers. Effective communication between nurses is necessary to reduce nursing errors and avoid the risk factors that can create stress or affect their mental wellbeing. Apart from this, it is also concluded nurses must focus on their physical health to reduce stress which may include participation in physical exercise and stress-relieving activities.

 

 

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