Date of Conferral

2022

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Nursing

Advisor

Kelly Fisher

Abstract

Resilience has been studied across a myriad of populations. Many resilience studies have focused on military service members, including military healthcare personnel, specifically nurses. Although many quantitative resilience studies have been conducted, there have been few qualitative studies in this area. Qualitative studies have focused solely on spiritual resilience, although mixed methods studies have identified other resilience characteristics. The aim of this descriptive phenomenological study was to identify resilience characteristics through rich description within the situational and philosophical patterns of resilience and gain a better understanding of how emergency and critical care military nurses honed resilience in the face of horrific trauma. Five military emergency and critical care nurses were interviewed to gain an understanding of their lived experience in the deployed setting of a Level 1 trauma center in Bagram, Afghanistan between 2005 and 2010. A continuous iterative process revealed several themes: (a) unprepared for the assignment, (b) leadership in name and/or position only, (c) relationships, and (d) safety. Findings from the data indicated that the participants embodied many resilience characteristics from the situational and philosophical patterns, such as active problem-oriented coping, realistic assessment of one’s capacity to act, determination, problem solvers, perseverance, persistence, sense of being in control, adaptability, reflection about oneself and events, and reflective changes over time. It was evident that resilience was cultivated during and from the nurses’ experiences, leading to the need for additional qualitative studies with these and other military healthcare personnel with the same experiences to further understand how resilience is developed.

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