Question

Stress and burnout are very common in nursing practice. Nursing students are aware of the many demands nurses and prospective nurses face each day. 3 Good Things is an intervention to promote resilience and individual happiness?

Answer 1

Nurses have an elevated prevalence of job-related burn-out and post-traumatic stress disorder, which can ultimately impact patient care. To strengthen healthcare workers’ skills to deal with stressful events, it is important to focus not only on minimising suffering but also on increasing happiness, as this entails many more benefits than simply feeling good.

Three Good Things is a simple, powerful, low-cost tool that can be used throughout a healthcare organization to help individuals, teams, and organizations counteract the natural tendency to focus on the negative. Nursing leaders can reap the benefits of Three Good Things in many ways. The key is to find the best way to implement it for your own work environment. Whether you implement it as a daily, weekly, or monthly activity, you’ll be able to realize the value of an intentional focus on the positive.

Individuals

Anyone can start a Three Good Things intervention tonight. At the end of the day, before you go to bed, write down three good things that happened that day and reflect on why they happened. For maximum impact, repeat this daily exercise for 2 weeks. You may find it challenging at first to come up with three good things from your day, but the good news is that by day 4 or 5 remembering the good becomes easier. The brain begins to more effectively recognize and interpret the positive moments that we experience each day. This powerful tool can be used to improve your current levels of well-being and any time you begin to feel that your personal resources are being depleted.

Teams

Education on Three Good Things increases staff awareness of this tool, but ensuring staff adherence to the intervention outside of the workplace may be challenging. A little creativity can help engage staff in noticing the positive over a 2-week period. For example, pass around a sheet at the end of each shift on which staff can write down a good thing that happened that day. Then share three of those good things at change-of-shift report to start positive conversations rather than defaulting to our tendency to share stress and difficulties.

Meetings

Incorporating Three Good Things in meetings can be as simple as asking participants to share something good at the start of each meeting. When you start on a positive note, you can change the meeting’s tone and enhance the engagement of staff in discussions of unit initiatives and challenges. Alternatively, ending your meetings by sharing good things allows individuals to leave the meeting with positive energy that they can bring back to the team.

Another option is asking staff to share Three Good Things and then one thing that can be done better. This approach can help remove the barriers that staff members face in speaking up about the challenges they experience at work. As a new nurse manager, I used this concept in my individual one-on-one meetings with each staff member. In addition to building connections with each employee, I garnered valuable insight into the existing strengths and opportunities for improvement on my new unit.