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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
* There is an increasing interest in the mental health benefits and protections offered by mindfulnessbased interventions in healthcare organizations.
* Mindfulness is a mind-body approach that helps people to attend to their experiences and cognitively process them in a way that reduces stressful emotional reactions to them.
* Healthcare organizations that have implemented mindfulness-based interventions into their workplace wellness programs have found several positive effects on nursing staff.
* There are clear interpersonal and intrapersonal benefits to the use of mindfulness-based interventions, which help to reduce stress and increase coping in nursing staff who face challenging workplace environments.
AS HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS strive to provide high-quality patient care * outcomes in a challenging health and social environment, the role of nursing becomes even more vital, at a time when current working conditions are increasingly stressful and challenging for nursing staff. Although the last economic downturn in the United States led to a drop in nursing staff turnover rates, the costs related to replacing staff still remain high and impact on the workplace. Instances of workplace attrition can further exacerbate challenging working conditions, making it even more difficult for staff to provide a high level of nursing care excellence. These pressures often result in stress and burnout among remaining staff, and may become factors that prevent quality care outcomes.
Despite these challenges, there are also opportunities to support nursing staff, which can help improve workplace conditions and correspondingly improve quality care outcomes for patients. The expansion of workplace wellness programming to include mindfulness-based interventions shows great promise as a preventative mental health support for staff, which may help prevent nursing turnover. Such interventions can work to reduce stress and burnout, emotional reactivity, and anxiety, while improving personal resiliency and coping, and include guided meditations, relaxation exercises involving breath training or physical movement such as yoga, and mindfulness training courses such as Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (Moody et al., 2013; Shapiro, Astin, Bishop, & Cordova, 2005). These interventions deserve further consideration by nursing and healthcare organizational leaders, with the aim of supporting their use by nurses to help build high-quality workplaces, which can in turn lead to the desired high-quality patient care outcomes for patients.
Scope of the Problem: Nursing Turnover
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