Resilience and adaptability

How to demonstrate resilience during your preregistration training

What is resilience?

• “the ability to bounce back after encountering difficulty........and fundamentally related to the experience and management of stress” (Southwick and Charney (2012))

• “The ability to maintain personal and professional wellbeing in the face of on-going work stress and adversity”(McCann et al (2013))

What situations can test your resilience?

• Time pressures•

• Workload•

• Multiple roles•

• Emotional issues

• Lack of respect

• Patients (customers) demands

How to demonstrate resilience – factors

• Realistic optimism• Facing fear• Moral compass• Religion and spirituality• Cognitive and emotional flexibility• Social support• Resilient role model• Physical fitness• Brain fitness• Meaning and purpose

Sample question

• You started your preregistration training about 6 months ago in a busy hospital. The Pharmacists and supporting staff within your team are unhelpful. They do not seem to recognise your role as PreReg pharmacist. You are made to undertake duties which you know should be done by other junior staff. You feel burnout and frustrated

Select the three attributes you would adopt to show resilience and adaptability?

• Reflective ability

• Emotional intelligence

• Emotional literacy

• Social competence

• Social support

Three attributes…….

• Reflective ability• Emotional intelligence• Emotional literacy• Social competence• Social support

What is emotional intelligence or literacy?

• The ability ‘to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations: to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathise and to hope’ (Goleman, 1996)

Sample question

• You are working in the community pharmacy and a customer on a scooter comes to request his repeat medications. After checking on the electronic prescriptions screen (EPS), you realised that all his medications have been dispensed and collected the previous week. He explained that co-codamol was not in the bag when he opened it at home. But you insisted that from your records, you dispensed all his medicines. He becomes angry and even abusive.

Rank the following in

order of most

appropriate action to

take

• Use your resilience skills to remain calm and explain that you dispensed all his medicines including the co-codamol

• Recommend that he goes back home and check in his medicine bag again or cabinet because you are confident all his medicines were dispensed.

• Dispense a new co-codamol for the patient, even if you are confident that you supplied all his medicines.

• Recommend that he goes to his GP for a new prescription for co-codamol

• Inform him that abusive behaviour is not welcomed in the pharmacy, and he could be prevented from coming to the pharmacy in future.

Explanation of the ranking

• There are times where your inner strength would be tested when dealing with patients. These are times where your resilience skills would need to be deployed. This sample case illustrates one of those moments, where you are convinced you have given all the medicines out, yet the patient insist you still owe him some medicines.The best option is to use your resilience skills to remain calm and explain that you dispensed all his medicines including the co-codamol. Both your communication skills, (especially facial expression), and your resilience skills would be used to remain calm and then insist that you supplied all his medicines. You can then recommend that he goes back home and check his bag again. If all these fail, then the only other option is to re-dispensed the co-codamol (at a loss to the company). Asking him to go back for another prescriptionmay aggravate the matter or threatening with preventing him from ever coming to the pharmacy is too extreme.

More questions and the forum

• You can access more questions by clicking on the link below• https://youronlinepharmcist.com/2019/09/06/situational-

judgement-test-sjt/

• Have got any questions? Go to the forum and post your questions.• https://youronlinepharmcist.com/forums/