Phenomenological Study of Nurses Caring for Dying Patients: Review of Qualitative Study

This author’s personal perceptions concerning patients facing a lingering terminal illness, have been shaped by over 20 years of critical care nursing experience. Facing death and illness on a daily basis requires self-examination and a high degree of comfort with one’s own mortality, limits and values. Constant exposure to the fragility of life forces respect for the whole person and the people who love them. A general approach to patients who are actively dying is to allow them to define what they want and need during this time. The nurse’s role

On reading this article and identifying the study, there was a clear insight on how death and dying, and even improved health, impacted those nurses (Conte, 2014). Nurses, who worked closely with their patients, through the perils and suffering, culminating of death and losses, had grief not readily explored to enable that comfort zone (Conte, 2014).

The purpose of this paper is to critique a qualitative research article in all phases of the report. For this purpose, the article that will be used is “Lamentation and loss: expression of caring by contemporary surgical nurses” written by Carol Enns and David Gregory. This paper will address the problem statement, literature review, conceptual underpinnings and research questions, research design/method, ethical considerations, sampling, data collection, data analysis, confirmability of the findings, interpretation and discussion of findings, additional considerations, and rating the scientific merit of a research report.

1.1 Caring for patients at the end of life is a challenging task that requires not only the consideration of the patient as a whole but also an understanding of the family, social, legal, economic, and institutional circumstances that surround patient care.

Nurses: Assist the patients and families to cope with the end-of-life process such as assessing and

When asked to develop a personal nursing philosophy caring was found to be the main component. Jean Watson’s Caring Science as Sacred Science reflects this philosophy in which caring is the predominate component needed in nursing. This paper will provided basic information on the Caring Science as Sacred Science Theory. The paper will further provide a personal example of a patient experience in which this theory shaped the care and healing of the patient. The personal experience to be shown in this paper involves a patient with complex chronic illness. The patient had been hospitalized for over a month. Patients with chronic illness and in the hospital often experience feeling powerless, scared, distant, and confined (Kay Hogan & Cleary, 2013). When these feelings persist they overcome the patient and do not allow the patient to concentrate on healing or being an active member of the healthcare team. Patients in this situation need caring and psychosocial support before moving on with medical care. However, this can often be hard for the healthcare team. When a patient has complex complications often treating these issues is all the team has time for due to patient load and institutional demands. Jean Watson (2009) recognizes this in her work Caring Science and Human Caring Theory: Transforming Personal and Professional Practices of Nursing and Health Care. Watson (2009) recognizes nurses are often torn between values of human caring

Death is a part of life and eventually everyone on this earth will experience it. Nurses play an important role in death. Mourning the death of a loved one is something that almost everyone will experience in this lifetime because it is a natural response to death. Bereavement, grief and mourning are all effected by one’s culture, religion, the relationship with the deceased, personality, and how the person died.

Dying is a process that involves the entire family; that is to say, the family that is defined by the person. The nurse must be aware that this is not only an individual process but a family process. This involves recognizing family dynamics and communication patterns and facilitating healthy interactions.

Death is inevitable at some point everyone must face it. Whether it is the death of a family member, friend, or a family pet, people are forced to deal with the death. Nurses however have more frequent encounters with death than the average person does. When a patient dies in a healthcare setting his or her nurse is obligated to deal with that as well. They must find ways to cope with the increased amount of death that

Acute hospitals play a significant role in end of life care, it is the place where most people die. Evidence suggests that end of life care in hospitals needs improvement. The purpose of this paper was to investigate patient and family experiences of hospital death, the weaknesses within the hospital setting and possible solutions to improve. A literature search identified common themes, these included:

I t is important that end of life care is delivered in respect of patients Autonomy, Beneficence, and in a Truthful way. In what follows I argue that we as nurses need to fulfill obligation to support and assist the dying patient and his family’s right to self-determination as it relates to end of life care. I believe that we have made headway but still have much to achieve. Education and research in these areas by and for health care workers and the general population would do much to improve the quality of end of life care.

In the nursing profession, It is a nurse’s duty to make sure that patients are medically taken care of and that various needs are met in order to apply the most comfort for the patient. Nurses are needed to make sure that medication is administered on schedule, wounds and body care are cleaned, and educational teaching is involved with the patient care. It should be the nurses’ goal to make sure patients will be able to leave the health care facilities feeling physically and mentally better before they came in for said reasons. Sometimes the nurses can do so much for some patients that all they can do is to provide care until their end of life. Usually end of life scenarios are that some patients have been through a traumatic accidents such as vehicle on vehicle collision or terminal illness such as cancer.

Overview: University of Kansas, article entitled: Creating a curtain of protection: nurses’ experiences of grief following patient death. This title was clear and unambiguous suggesting the key phenomenon under study. Too long or too short titles can be confusing or misleading (Parahoo, 2006), however, this title contained few words which adequately described the contents and purpose of the paper being studied. The abstract provided a succinct overview of the research, it brought out the main features of the report and included relevant information. It captivated my interest which motivated me to continue reading. This paper is a qualitative research written by L. Gerow and colleagues. In this study eleven registered nurses were interviewed using semi-structured interviews and phenomenology concepts. Audio-tapes and demographic questionnaires were also used. The data was analysed using methods of Heideggerian hermeneutical analysis and Van Manen’s progression. The purpose was to describe the lived experiences of nurses surrounding patient’s death. It entails how nurses deal with such situation differently by creating a curtain of protection to mitigate the grieving process allowing them to continue providing supportive nursing care. The aim was to investigate nurses’ grief to develop

Many nurses are regularly confronted with the hopelessness and exhaustion of patients and their families making it difficult for them to find balance between the preservation of life and the enablement of a dignified death. Nurses must acknowledge their own feelings of sorrow, fear, dismay and helplessness and recognize the impact of these emotions in clinical decision making. These distressing pressures may cause a nurse to contemplate intentionally assist in ending a patient's life as a humane and compassionate answer, however; the conventional goals and standards of the nursing profession mitigate against it.

The objective of this paper is to unravel the reason and manner by which nurses take care of patients as human beings. I believe that patients are best taken care of when nurses handle them in such a way that humans need to be taken care of: through a holistic and spiritual treatment. By rationalizing humanistic nursing theories with theories of human nature, such as dualism and existentialism, as well as perceiving man as an embodied spirit and a relational being, a more holistic approach is given to a patient as a human being.