“Wicked” problems occur not just for patients in healthcare services,
as can be seen in Chapter 1, Resilience in Nursing, but also for nurses
in attempting to change and improve their own professional culture.
Nursing’s advancement and professionalization has been hampered
by internal and external tensions, including professional disunity,
public misunderstanding and devaluation, and lack of political will
and support to improve conditions (Thorne, 2015). This situation
leads to further problems, such as stress, conflict, and burnout, and
defensive coping mechanisms that can metamorphose into uncaring
behaviors toward patients. It is these "wicked" problems of stress,
burnout, and conflict that we focus on in this chapter