Pediatric Nurses' Grief Experience, Burnout and Job Satisfaction1
Section snippets
Grief and Nurses
COWLES AND RODGERS (1991) defined grief as “dynamic, pervasive, highly individualized process with a strong normative component” (p. 121). Pediatric nurses have a unique caring role because of the vulnerable nature of their patients and the special bonds that can form when caring for patients and their families (Scott, 1994). This relationship can expose nurses to intense and recurrent experiences with unresolved loss and grief when one of their patients suffers from a terminal illness or dies (
Sample and Sampling
A convenience sample of 120 pediatric nurses was recruited from a large midwestern academic medical center's four pediatric patient care units and pediatric float pool RN's. Participants were recruited based on the following criteria:
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Minimum pediatric experience of 12 months.
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Worked at 0.5 FTE or more at the time of data collection in pediatric setting in the 12 months before data collection started.
Instrumentation and Measurement
The study used four instruments to collect data. The demographic information form (DIF) collected
Demographic Description
Out of 214 eligible pediatric nurses at a large Midwestern Academic Medical Center, 120 (56%) participated in the study. Paper-and-pencil surveys were returned by 87 participants (72.5%), and 33 surveys (27.5%) were submitted online. Participants' ages ranged from 23–62 years (m = 34, SD = 10). Summary of participants' demographic characteristics are in Table 1a, Table 1b.
Nurse Experience With Patient Death
Participants reported a range of zero to 40 patient deaths in the previous 12 months (m = 13, SD = 9). Forty seven participants (39%)
Discussion
It is not surprising that nurses' reactions to the death of their patients are not as intense or overreaching as those of the patient's family members. Consistent with reviewed literature (Brown and Wood, 2009, Feldstein and Buschman-Gemma, 1995, Papadatou et al., 2002), this study suggests that nurses experience grief over the death of their patients in ways similar to the patient's family members, yet to lesser extents. This study demonstrated that nurses' grief scores were near-normally
Recommendation for Practice
Informal strategies of coping with grief and its consequences such as sharing feelings with peers, loved ones, and relaxation techniques, while seen helpful by some nurses, may not be adequate to overcome the emotional as well as the physical aspects of the grieving process. Worse yet, sharing feelings may actually be working against its perceived benefit. A professional early intervention program for nurses is recommended to be used regularly when a situation calls for grief intervention
Conclusion
This study has demonstrated that pediatric nurses are at a real risk of experiencing grief following their patients' death. It is evident that even though the participants of this study were highly satisfied with their jobs as evidenced by their high levels of job satisfaction and personal accomplishments, they still experienced grief in similar ways a family member does-albeit at a lower level. However, once nurses manage to cope with losing one patient, they may have a rerun of the same
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Funding: This research was supported in part by Sigma Theta Tau, Zeta Chapter at the University of Minnesota.