“It's a Thing”: What Nurse Elders Believe Novice Nurses Need to Know About Managing Emotional Labour

Abstract

Background Emotional labour (EL) can take a significant toll on nurses’ mental health and well-being and has serious implications for the retention of nurses in the workforce. Nurse educators have struggled to prepare novices to manage EL or find serviceable resources with which to do so within the body of nursing literature, which is dominated by essentially unhelpful narratives and is absent of the practical, real-world wisdom of elder nurses. Purpose This exploratory research study illuminated elder nurses’ experiential knowledge and beliefs of what is important for novices to learn about EL. Methods Conventional Content Analysis (CCA) of qualitative survey data from 688 nurses with 20+ years of experience. Results CCA generated descriptive categories and sub-categories: What the elders themselves learned as student nurses, and their advice to novices in the individual realm, (“It's a Thing,” healthy disengagement, supporting mental and physical well-being, reframing self-reproach), team realm (peer support, mentors), and institutional realm (structural barriers to mentors’ support of novices, building novices’ capacities for self-advocacy, resources to support health and well-being). Conclusions The elders’ data confronted and reframed legacy individuated narratives in the literature by supporting and contextualizing nurses’ emotional work. Elders advised novices that EL is a reality requiring concrete strategies to manage it throughout their practices. Elders extended their focus for management of EL beyond the individual to include peer support, mentorship, and the structural conditions in which nurses perform their EL, highlighting the need to empower nurses by building their capacity for self-advocacy of their workers’ rights.