Essay On Grieving In Nursing

The aspects of the grieving process have been explored comprehensively in families losing loved ones or in a patient’s grieving over a terminal illness. The patients and families live through this experience at least once in their lifetime. What about the nurse who lives through it by caring for these patients and families? How does a nurse grieve? There been limited research that has been done about the grieving process for nurses. The purpose of this paper is to explain on the subject of the grieving process of nurses when they experience loss and suffering that they share with patients and their families. This grieving concept can help further development of nursing research and education, and beneficially help future nursing practice and

Trying to suppress the feelings associated with the death of a patient can take a heavy toll on the caregiver and can lead to compassion fatigue and moral distress. This can affect proficiency of care, customer service, costs to the hospital, nursing morale and ethic and maintaining the nursing staff. Mourning over the death of a patient is often not a part of the norm and is somewhat taboo due to the high amount of people they serve. Nurses, therefore, rarely talk about their grief and often do not feel they have a right or role to grieve over their patients who pass or suffer while in their care. Brosche (2010) believes this behavior is linked to “moral distress and, if not addressed, can lead to the loss of the best and the brightest nurses” (pg.

Nurses can develop moral distress when they feel forced from supporting for the patients’ interests due to situational or administrative pressures. When there is a greater emphasis on the technical aspects of nursing care, this leads to less of a stress on the ethics of care. Gerow et al. (2009) however, identified that “the greatest source of moral distress was related to the ethical issues surrounding death, dying, and the aggressive delivery of care to patients who would not benefit from treatment” (pg. 1079). It is likely that moral distress will become more intense as technology expands and that continuing to ignore this problem can affect the quality of patient care and other roles of the nursing and health care