Prof. Michal Itzhaki

Prof. Michal Itzhaki explores emotions and the emotional management of patients and caregivers in complex care situations. She uses mixed methods designs. Investigation of the emotions experienced by patients, their families, and the care team includes attention to personal resilience. Her research found that using social media platforms enhances nursing students' resilience and satisfaction with their clinical placement. She examined the role of personal resilience of healthcare students on their attitudes towards interprofessional collaboration and found that developing resilience in healthcare professionals during their professional training increases their perception of their ability to cooperate with other professions.  

In her recent study on the emotion management and resilience of nurses and physicians who treat pediatric patients from the Palestinian Authority in Israel, she found positive correlations between nurses’ and physicians’ identification with the ethos of healthcare and their resilience, emotional gap, and emotion management. This study supports the theory of emotion management and refines the role of the healthcare ethos in building resilience among healthcare professionals.

Another aspect she investigates is violence directed at healthcare staff and the connections to staff resilience and emotion work.

She focuses on healthcare professionals' resilience from a group perspective: perceived staff resilience. The findings of her studies indicate that staff resilience is a factor that could be important to nurses' ability to cope with demanding situations. She pointed out the importance of enhancing staff resilience by increasing nurses’ sense of commitment to each other and cohesion in order to help them cope with workplace violence and increase their life satisfaction.

Her research forms the basis for developing intervention programs aimed at efficient emotional management as well as increasing the caregiver/patient's sense of resilience and emotional support.

Professional experience

Prof. Itzhaki, Department of Nursing, School of Health Professions, was the chair of the Nursing Department from 2018 until 2022. Currently, she is the chair of the MA program in the Nursing Department.  She collaborates with nursing theorists in academic institutions worldwide, exploring caring in multicultural societies and caregivers' personal and team resilience.

Education

Prof. Itzhaki completed her nursing degree at Tel Aviv University. She is the first registered nurse in Israel to have completed a direct Ph.D. track, which she obtained at the Nursing Department at Tel Aviv University. She completed her post-doctoral training at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar Ilan University.