The Importance Of A Nurse Has While They Are Caring For Their Patients

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

Nursing is one of the most intimate health care professions. They are connected to their patients as soon as they are admitted into their care right through until they are discharged into someone else’s care. With this, nurses have a strict professional identity and scope of practice to prevent a nurse from over stepping their professional boundaries. A nurses’ duty of care does go beyond the average healthcare professional but still does not impair the

Hardships that might prompt distress to incorporate the death or departure of a friend or family member, loss of a vocation, demise or loss of a cherished pet, or any number of different changes in life. Anybody can encounter melancholy and misfortune. However, every individual is extraordinary by the way he or she acclimatizes to these attitudes. In dealing with grief counseling, it can be described and understood as a form of therapy that explicitly focuses on the goal of helping individuals grieve and address their personal loss in a manner that is not only healthy for them but the people around them. To work through difficult feelings, thoughts, and memories that have to do with an associated pain of an individual is the goal of a grief counselor. Many of these strains and types of loss can include goals, ideals, and relationships. There is a process of grieving that many individuals do not understand, this can lead to many problems for that individual because the process is something normal to go through to cope with the given issue. Some of the symptoms that a person may go through are emotional numbness, disruptive sleep, short temperateness, lack of eating, and depression just to name a

Including the client as an expert member of the team creates an enhanced quality of care (Coad, Patel & Murray, 2014). In pediatrics, parents are often at the center of the child’s care. When asked to define what made the client care experience positive, parents stated that sensitivity, empathy and honesty were key factors (Coad, Patel & Murray, 2014). Working in healthcare, nurses can become desensitized to difficult experiences because they deal with them daily. Integrating the client and family as part of the healthcare team, allows the nurse to see the patient and family as a people first. By avoiding using illness as context, and instead using person as context, care will be more holistic (Coad, Patel & Murray, 2014). A family-focused approach helps to ensure that the whole family feels a part of the experience and is valued. In the case of bereavement, family centered care is particularly important. If the family is not included in the care from the start, it can provide barriers for grieving and impact how the family deals with loss (Jones, Contro & Koch, 2014). Nurses have an opportunity to help support the family through the grief process (Jones, Contro & Koch, 2014). Families have a significant impact on how the client heals, so by caring for the family’s needs, the nurse is indirectly caring for the patient. It is in the client’s best interest for the care to be holistic for the patient as well as the family (Jones, Contro & Koch, 2014). All

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).

It identifies studies that address the issue of having a variety of definitions for caring (Enns, 2007). This issue is relevant as it may vary the results of previous studies. The references are current to the article and well documented. The resources used are more for the definition of caring and to support the need of further research and not that of the specific topic of lamentation and loss expressed among surgical nurses (Enns, 2007). The fact that research on caring in many areas of nursing has been done, it is identified that there is a lack of research done on acute general surgical wards (Enns, 2007). The literature review examines different research designs used to cover the study of nurses’ caring but it does not examine the need to research further into the specific field of surgical nursing other then the lack of previous research (Enns, 2007).

Death is inevitable. It is one of the only certainties in life. Regardless, people are often uncomfortable discussing death. Nyatanga (2016) posits that the idea of no longer existing increases anxiety and emotional distress in relation to one’s mortality. Because of the difficulty in level of care for end-of-life patients, the patient and the family often need professional assistance for physical and emotional care. Many family caregivers are not professionally trained in medicine, and this is where hospice comes into play. Hospice aims to meet the holistic needs of both the patient and the patient’s family through treatment plans, education, and advocacy. There is a duality of care to the treatment provided by hospice staff in that they do not attempt to separate the patient’s care from the family’s care. Leming and Dickinson (2011) support that hospice, unlike other clinical fields, focuses on the patient and the family together instead of seeing the patient independent of the family. Many times in hospitals, the medical team focuses solely on the goal of returning the patient back to health in order for them to return to their normal lives. They do not take into account the psychological and spiritual components of the patient’s journey and the journey that the family must take as well. For treatment of the patient, Leming and Dickinson agree that hospice does not attempt to cure patients, and instead concentrates solely

Loss is a phenomenon that is experienced by all. Death is experienced by family members as a unique and elevated form of loss which is modulated by potent stages of grief. Inevitably, everyone will lose someone with whom they had a personal relationship and emotional connection and thus experience an aftermath that can generally be described as grief. Although bereavement, which is defined as a state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one, is a universal experience it varies widely across gender, age, and circumstance (definitions.net, 2015). Indeed the formalities and phases associated with bereavement have been recounted and theorized in literature for years. These philosophies are quite diverse but

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

To begin, there are many aspects of helping patients that are dealing with grief, loss, death, or dying. Whether the patient has lost someone that was close to them or they themselves are dying, the situation is quite fragile. Some important aspects that may help when handling these patients are knowledge about the different cultures and their beliefs and traditions, different factors that have an impact on grief, and how to communicate with people living on the edge of life. These are all extremely important matters when it comes to such a sensitive situation.

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.

But this may be what is necessary to begin the grieving process. In a case study published in the journal RN, the authors tell about a program designed to meet the unique needs of oncology nurses. This program was implemented at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. As a part of the program, the staff members who have cared for a patient are allowed to participate in a bedside memorial service. After the patient’s family has left the hospital, the chaplain will conduct a service for any of the employees who cared for that patient (Puckett, Hinds & Milligan, 1996). This would help nurses to accomplish the first of the four tasks of mourning-to accept the loss.

In relation to the purpose of this study, the driving force behind the research are three questions. What are nurses experience following patient’s death? What are their actions and coping strategies following patient death? Would better learning opportunities and supportive practice environments be provided once there is an understanding of nurses’ grief and coping process, if yes, was it beneficial. The researchers proceeded with a broad question which allowed the focus to be sharpened and delineated later in the

I agree with you the fear of dying is a powerful motivator is a great point to make. The dying patient needs emotionally support from family and health workers. And families don’t want to lose loved one with any condition. I understand this is hard for family members but as a nurse we need to educate the family members about patient wishes and desires. Always respect their culture, and nurse need to knows the cultural background during dying patient care and provide education. Need to educate the end of life complication and sign/symptoms. And I think nurses we can help the dying patient and family members through social worker, care coordinators, can assist people in getting their advanced directives completed, as well as provide information

As a nurse, you must understand the different types of death as well as the stages of grief in order to help the client as well as the family. According to Taylors, the different types of death include natural, sudden, and suicide. Natural death is when a person dies naturally like in their sleep from old age. This is expected. Sudden death is unexpected like when someone dies in a car crash. Suicide is when a person kills themselves. When understanding the stages of grief, the nurse should know that the stages don’t necessarily go in order. First is the denial stage. Denial is a coping technique that people use to protect themselves. An example of denial would be like a client saying “I’m not sick” or “I am not dying. The doctor does not know what he is talking about. I will get a second opinion.” Anger is the next stage, which is often directed at the family or healthcare members. Anger is when the client, family, or both are being rude. As the nurse, since you know that the client and the family are going through the grieving process, do not take the rudeness personal. Bargaining is making a deal with God to prolong life (Taylor). A patient might say, “Lord, if you save my life, I promise to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday.” Depression results from the loss experienced because of health care status and hospitalization. During the depression phase, the nurse might see a persistent feeling of sadness or loss of interest that