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Resilience Strength Time (ReST)

You've helped others.
Now it's time to care for yourself.

Resilience Strength Time, or ReST, is designed to help you maintain your resilience and passion as a frontline medical worker.

Attend a rest session

What is Resilience Strength Time?

ReST is online peer support to help front line care workers stay resilient and maintain positive commitments to the field of caregiving. Confidential, small group sessions facilitated by trained peers provide the opportunity for sharing, reflection and self-care to relieve moral distress.

PEERS WHO WANT
TO HELP

Medical peers are trained to be facilitators for one-hour group sessions nearly every day of the week.

ReST SESSIONS

Using online technology, connecting with peers is simple and free.

GROUP SUPPORT WHEN
& WHERE YOU NEED IT

Connect with up to 6 other front line workers to share, reflect and remain resilient and healthy.

Without a chance to address moral distress, workers are at risk for moral injury. These conditions, akin to battlefield medicine, leads to the compromise of integrity, character, and a sense of life purpose.

  • Unrelenting, unavoidable encounters with an invisible lethal enemy
  • Self-serving or uninformed decisions by supervisors or leaders who increase the dangers to front line workers
  • Equipment and supply shortages requiring improvised strategies
  • Extreme physical and mental fatigue
  • Overwhelming numbers of patients who die without human comfort
  • The need to triage the sickest patients, deciding who lives and who dies
Developed by Volunteers of America, ReST uses trained peers to support other front line workers experiencing feelings of moral distress, using skills and strategies developed in VOA’s evidence-based program for military veterans called Resilience Strength Training ™

If you are interested in bringing ReST to your organization, contact us at rest@voa.org

PARTNERS

What is moral distress?

Under the extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19, the pace and load of work is relentlessly exhausting and disheartening, and the resilience resources of frontline workers can be seriously depleted. Moral distress happens when things go wrong, and is felt in emotions such as sorrow, frustration, guilt, shame, humiliation, or despair. It can include anger and grief at personal failures, loss, or betrayal by those in authority who fail to do the right thing. If frontline workers lack a safe, confidential, effective way to discharge moral distress, they are at risk of developing moral injury.

What is moral resilience?

Your moral codes reflect what you love most, value most highly, and feel most dedicated to defending in this world. Your moral conscience is grounded in your codes, and it guides how you live out your most deeply held expectations of yourself and others.

Moral resilience is maintained when you process moral distress and are able to respond to ethical challenges, dilemmas, and uncertainty in ways that allow you to continue serving with your moral codes and sense of worth intact. It is accepting limitations about things that you cannot control, finding life-lessons in negative experiences, and remaining grounded in what matters most to you. It involves your finding meaning in life and work, handling complex, confusing, infuriating, and frustrating experiences with courage and determination, and reflecting on moral stresses and ethical challenges in order to restore your integrity and maintain important relationships.