experiences of nurses grief after patient death

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

One is to help the bereaved to develop their own ways of coping and the other is to ensure that their own difficulties, needs and attitudes relating to death and dying of their patients do not compromise their psychological well-being. It was noted by the same author that the psychological impact and after events prevalent in a critical care nurses’ working environment remains relatively unexplored. Michell (2010) also felt that repetitive exposure to resuscitative measures, end-of-life care needs, prolonging life by pharmacological and mechanical means and the continuous adjustment of these critical care nurses to this hostile environment, results in psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress

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).

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

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

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.

Individuals enter nursing with a wide array of experiences in how they grieve the loss of someone or something. These experiences follow them into their career and express themselves in the way they grieve for the loss of a patient. Evidence shows that this has historically been inadequate and unhealthy. To prevent the negative impact that ineffective grieving has upon the individual the approach to the grieving process must change. In doing so nurses will become more emotionally and physically stable while going through these difficult times, ultimately helping the healthcare institution to thrive.

Disenfranchised grief can affect an individual experiencing loss that is not societally recognized. A term originally described by Kenneth Doka, disenfranchised grief is classically defined by four components, and one specific population subject to experiencing disenfranchised grief is nurses. This is due to the predominant cultural values found in the nursing profession as well as the parameters of the nurse-patient relationship. Knowing that nurses are potentially vulnerable to disenfranchised grief, it is important to discuss the mechanisms to minimize the factors contributing to its occurrence and the consequences of its effects. Awareness of how to help oneself can then be utilized to increase efficacy in the nurse’s position and in aiding patients who are duly experiencing disenfranchised grief.

A Good Death by Carolyn Adams talks about being present while assessing a patient. Carolyn Adams sits on the side of the patient’s bed to talk to them so they feel like she is not in a rush to get out of the room. Sometimes peoples standing posture shows that they are in a hurry to get somewhere else. In this story is it expressed that palliative care nurses are not miracle workers, they are there to allow the palliative patients to have a “good death” (SOURCE, PICARD, 2000). The purpose of this assignment is to effectively reflect on a nurse’s story, identify the themes that are present and to integrate Carper’s (1978) ways of knowing into the story.

There is an increasing amount of research centring on health care student experiences of facing the death of a patient, however, substantial gaps have been identified with regards to exploring healthcare professions experiences of death as a group. It has been acknowledged that most of the research on this topic focuses on a singular profession, nevertheless, with a significant increase in the emphasis of the importance of interdisciplinary working, particularly within the healthcare sector, it has been established that looking at the experiences of health care professions synergistically would be hugely beneficial in establishing key themes throughout the different professions.

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.

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

Upon choosing nursing as a career, it is understood that in this position there would be more death and loss than any other field previously considered. With that realization it is important to understand how to deal with death, and nurse role in the process. By looking at a collective of research articles, it is important to point out that as a nurse death is not experienced by a single individual. It is with this idea that employers should focus in order to help relieve grief or compassion fatigue in employees. This paper explores the circumstances of death that nurses deal with and the coping mechanisms that are most common, with the conclusion of what healthcare employers can do to help alleviate the grief that accompanies.

I have chosen the topic of coping with death to construct a paper which can value my nursing career as well as make sense of one of the biggest impacts on nurses. It is important to learn how to cope with this situation so you can offer the best care to your patients/family of the patients.In a developed world, most people will die in hospitals from illness (Berk, L. E. 2018).