Taking Time to Enjoy Some Coffee! Adding Mindfulness to the Curriculum

Abstract

Nursing students and graduate nurses are notoriously stressed, with high impact exams and the need to learn mass amounts of information plus clinical skills, creates an area ripe for tension [1]. Add in a pandemic halfway through the semester, and anxiety levels increase even more. Once they graduate, however, this stress does not go away, it often intensifies for the first couple of years postgraduation [2]. Current information shows once they graduate, only 18% of nurses feel they are prepared with adequate self-care skills to manage the effects caused from day to day events of the work environment. Nursing school curriculums typically do not help prepare students to deal with the stressors of their jobs, with only 6% of nursing schools providing any type of mindfulness skills in the curriculum [3,4].