Root Strength: A Health and Care Professionals' Guide to Minimizing Stress and Maximizing Thriving

Develop resilience and thrive as a care professional! Root Strength: A Health and Care Professionals’ Guide to Minimizing Stress and Maximizing Thriving discusses principles of self-care that can help you prevent emotional fatigue and job burnout in highly stressful workplaces. An evidence-based approach examines how the care professional can develop self-compassion, mindfulness, relationships with co-workers, and perceived satisfaction with one’s career. Written by noted educator and researcher Shannon Dames, this practical manual shows how you can apply these insights on the job and enhance your personal well-being in real-world health care settings. With the prevalence of mental health issues among care professionals ― including rates of PTSD and major depressive disorder (MDD) ― appearing much higher than that in the general population, never has a resource like this been more required!

• Focus on both theory and practice allows for self-assessment and the ability to build resilience and thrive, with concepts underpinned by research.
• UNIQUE! Journeys case studies highlight a care professional’s real-world experience/concerns, encouraging you to think about how you would handle the situation as you read through the chapter; the chapter closes with an effective method to handle the real-life situation, demonstrating how to apply the lessons learned.
• UNIQUE! Clear and conversational writing style and metaphorical roots/tree framework makes it easier to understand concepts.
• Practical exercises throughout the text allow you to build and strengthen your own metaphorical roots.
• Vignettes demonstrate how concepts apply to real-world scenarios.
• Attuning for the Journey Ahead sums up the content at the end of each chapter, ensuring that you understand the key concepts.
• UNIQUE! Special boxes contributed by Dr. Crosbie Watler, MD, FRCPC help you understand and navigate through professionals’ mental health challenges.

Dr. Shannon Dames holds a doctorate degree in Education, and has worked in various capacities related to nursing, program development, and research over the last 20 years. She is a professor and researcher with the Nursing program at Vancouver Island University, and a forensic nurse examiner with Island Health. The program of research that she is focusing on centres on articulating the most significant factors that will enable meaningful and sustainable culture change in health care. Her efforts centre on seeding culture change from a bottom up (personal resilience) and top-down approach (systemic resilience).

Dr. Dames is an academic journal article author, Elsevier text author and contributor, and a keynote speaker. She continues to facilitate workshops that focus on the experiential development of the core factors that enable humans to thrive. She comes to this work motivated to provide the tools necessary for us to address the international mental health crises we are facing in health care and beyond. Dr. Dames has received multiple grant awards to support her ongoing program of research, which includes collaborative endeavours with the health authority, academic institutions, and the BC Centre on Substance Use.