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Natural Awakenings Dallas -Fort Worth Metroplex Edition

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Bringing Resilience to Humanity Through Health Care

Aug 31, 2018 01:33PM ● By Sheila Julson

In today’s American health care model, nurses deal with myriad stressors that can take a toll on their physical and emotional well-being and impact patient outcomes. In the publication Patient Safety and Quality: An Evidence-Based Handbook for Nurses, there is an entire chapter dedicated to work stress and burnout. This inspired Lyn McCright, a registered nurse, adult and gerontological nurse practitioner and long-time nursing consultant to found her business, Advancing Holistic Health.

This online school offers courses to empower registered nurses and licensed health professionals to learn principles of the Resilience Paradigm, which creates healthier people by allowing them to have a better understanding of how we create our experiences of life, with a primary focus on living in the present.

“In holistic nursing, we have three main components: first, treat patient as a whole, considering body, mind and spirit; the second is that we include alternative modalities when appropriate— and there are times when it’s not always appropriate—and thirdly, take care of the nurse first,” McCright says.

McCright is a board-certified health and wellness nurse coach and advanced holistic nurse with a master’s degree in public helth from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. She’s a nationwide speaker and leader in transforming advanced practices of holistic and integrative nursing. McCright began nurse consulting 30 years ago, teaching the Resilience Paradigm in her private practice in California. Now in Texas, McCright has offered the program through Advancing Holistic Health for the past two years. The program is offered virtually on three continents, North America, Asia and Europe.

“The Resilience Paradigm is related to the field of psychology, and psychology captures every possible part of our human life on the planet Earth,” McCright says. “We offer national board certification as a nurse coach through the American Holistic Nurses Credentialing Corporation, as well as health coach certification for other licensed health professionals.”

Advancing Holistic Health’s Resilience Paradigm has four main objectives—insight-based learning, identifying the most important factor that deceptively limits resilience, recognizing how resilience develops properties of physical and psychological healing and utilizing that paradigm to generalize all nursing patient care.

The course is offered in four parts: Essentials, which introduces the principles of the Resilience Paradigm; Understanding, which helps students deepen their understanding of the concept; Sharing, where students learn to share the Resilience Paradigm with others; and Practice, in which participants learn how to apply resilience coaching in the workplace.

McCright says that Advancing Holistic Health’s faculty and students took part in a National Institutes of Health research study published in May in the Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. They reported improved interpersonal relationships, refinement in their own health and health behaviors and job satisfaction. Advancing Holistic Health has taught students to leave stress at work and not bring any suffering home. “Those are big factors in nursing today,” McCright says. “The main reasons for enrollees becoming nurse coaches are to enhance their own skills and nursing practices, and to be able to deliver care with their values and philosophies. They also want to obtain credentials and work to empower others and their clients.”

She notes that the program has also helped nurses more effectively deal with the three most common conditions seen today in patient health care: anxiety and stress, cardio-metabolic conditions and pain issues. McCright notes that the World Health Organization has developed terminology for these modern-day stressors: non-communicable diseases. “Because we’re seeing more of these diseases, I think programs like Advancing Holistic Health will become more common and continue to grow in the coming months and years,” she says.

Graduate support includes advanced training held once a month and a private Facebook page for students and graduates to reach out with questions or comments. “When we are grounded in our own resilience, it’s very natural for us to share our resilience with others,” McCright says. “As we become more grounded, all of our distracted thinking drops away. The more that we see our lives through the lens of resilience, the more we live resiliently.”

For more information about Advancing Holistic Health, call 254-751-7111 or visit AdvancingHolisticHealth.com.

Sheila Julson is a freelance writer and contributor to Natural Awakenings magazines throughout the country.