Building a resilient nursing workforce: Reflective learning and mentalization in education

Abstract This study investigates the impact of reflective learning on mentalization and resilience enhancement among nursing students, addressing the emotional challenges in nursing. Nursing professionals face significant stress, underlining the importance of resilience skills. Reflective learning techniques used during the initial nursing curriculum, like portfolios, are explored as means to foster resilience by promoting self-awareness, emotional regulation, and engagement with personal experiences. The research follows a qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews with six first-year nursing students from a University of Applied Sciences in Western Switzerland. The findings highlight themes of vulnerability, defense mechanisms facilitating mentalization, and essential resilience skills such as communication, emotional management, and problem-solving. Reflective writing within learning portfolios emerged as a critical tool for developing resilience by enhancing communicative skills and emotional management. This study underlines the need of integrating reflective approaches into nursing education to provide students with the necessary mental strength and resilience skills to manage professional challenges. It proposes more studies on the enduring impacts of reflective learning on nursing students, to advance our understanding of educational practices that promote resilience.