704 - A holistic approach to preparing workforce-ready students through resiliency development, professional identity development, and clinical support

Nursing school is noted to be a stressful experience for students. In addition to the stressors of nursing school, students are graduating and joining a workforce facing shortage and burnout. Nursing programs have become even more important to prepare graduates to be resilient and function in the current workforce. We will share the anecdotal methods used to support student resiliency and discuss potential opportunities for the future. High-impact practices, mindfulness strategies, professional identity development, and clinical partnerships will be addressed.

Merriam-Webster (2023) defines resilience as the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress. Resiliency can further be defined as an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change (Merriam-Webster, 2023). The nursing student is faced with many challenges once entering the program that include significant knowledge gain, financial pressures, and exposure to different clinical situations (Aloufi et al., 2021). In addition to these stressors, nursing students will be joining a workforce that is facing a shortage and increased burnout post pandemic. These factors illustrate the importance of establishing methods within the nursing program to promote student resilience, stress reduction, and professional identity development.

Strategies in the literature that have been proven to increase resilience include stress reduction, mindfulness strategies, promoting an educational environment that reduces stress, ensuring adequate resources such as clinical refresher courses use of student support services and interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, and multi-level (ICM) interventions, and review of curricular design for high-stakes scenarios (Aloufi et al., 2020; Heath et al., 2021; Tan, 2022). These interventions will be discussed in detail and applied to the student population. In addition, the interventions of professional identity development and clinical support will be discussed. Studies have found that interventions aimed at promoting professional identity development can have positive effects on students' attitudes towards their careers and their sense of preparedness for the workforce (Huang et al., 2021; Willcockson et al., 2017). In addition, by supporting students with consistent clinical placements, the stress of new clinical experiences will be reduced and students will be increase their proficiency with working with local patient populations and clinical skills.