The Long-Term Impact of Resilience-Building Interventions on Nurses: A Narrative Review of the Quantitative Evidence and Its Implications for Critical Care Nurses.

backgroundTo minimize systematic bias, long-term follow-up is essential to assess the effect of resilience-building interventions. However, research focuses on the short-term period immediately following these interventions.

objectivesWe investigated the long-term impact of resilience-building interventions on nurses, as measured via RCTs.

methodsA narrative review based on a systematic literature search (September-15 November 2024) using the keywords "Resilience/Psychological, Adaptation/Psychological, nurses, randomized controlled trial, follow-up" in the EBSCOhost, MEDLINE, ProQuest, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus databases was applied.

resultsA total of 38 studies were identified. Of these, only six encompassed long-term follow-up assessment after resilience-building interventions, also meeting the inclusion criteria for this review. Two of them focused on critical care nurses. Intervention durations ranged from 8 to 12 weeks, with shorter interventions also included (90 min lecture on stress, 3 h sensory awareness class). These data suggest that resilience improvements may become apparent 3 months post intervention, even when no immediate improvement is observed upon program completion, highlighting the importance of timing in the assessment process.

conclusionsThese findings provide valuable insights for researchers designing resilience programs in critical care environments. Selecting appropriate assessment tools and conducting measurements at multiple time points may be as crucial as the interventions themselves in determining their effectiveness. This is clinically meaningful since it may inform providers of resilience programs for the time frame during which they need to be applied. Potentially, future research can explore what characteristics these interventions need to have in order to be effective longitudinally.