Pediatric Nursing Research Paper

Grief Counseling for Pediatric Nurses

I believe that pediatric nurses should have ready access to grief counseling and support groups in order to help them easily deal with the loss of patients. Pediatric nurses are not just expected to be a health care provider; they are also supposed to be a caring person who is able to make the scary environment of a hospital feel more like a home to these children. These individuals are around these children almost 24/7 and they do tend to get attached, but when that child is taken away from them, it is going to affect them both personally and in their work. Access to things such as grief counseling and support groups within the hospital setting will help pediatric nurses be able to go into a case more

The world of pediatric nursing is something that is not fully appreciated until you get a first-hand look inside what it is really like to care for sick children who sometimes, unfortunately, do not always make it. Take oncology pediatric nurses for example. Their job is to care for and treat children with various forms of cancer, and besides the obvious, they also play a pivotal role in “optimizing the end of their patients’ life.” (Hildebrandt, p602) These individuals witness death on a day to day basis and they are trained to help a patients’ family deal with these losses, but they are on their own when it comes to how it affects them and how they are supposed to properly handle the situation. Many hospitals tell their nurses and doctors to simply not gain attachments to their patients, but that is something that is easier said than done. When someone is around a child every day, trying to help make them as comfortable in a hospital setting as possible, making sure they are happy despite what their health may be, it is difficult to not form some sort of bond. Surprisingly,

In the article titled, "The Lived Experience Of Pediatric Burn Nurses Following Patient Death." (Kellogg), nurses who work in the pediatric burn unit are interviewed about what they do as well as how they deal with the loss of patients. The conclusion of these interviews is that these individuals do not feel well prepared enough on how to properly handle the death of a patient and they all seemed to agree that grief counseling would have greatly increased their ability to get through these tough losses without starting to hate their job or not doing their job well enough. Another real life account comes from a working NICU nurse whom I interviewed named Clorinda Bryant. She told me all about how she absolutely loves her job and how she loves working with all the babies, but she concluded that by saying that it is a tough job to perform because “these babies have just come into this world and it seems unfair that sometimes they are taken out of it so quickly.” (Bryant) She told me how the hospital she works at does not have any services available to its workers regarding counseling and that if they need help dealing with a loss, they are expected to get their help outside of work and not deal with it there. When asked about whether or not hospitals should make it