Pediatric intensive care nurses and their grief experiences.

Abstract

While the phenomenon of grief has received considerable attention and has been researched at length, there is a paucity of literature that has focused on health care professionals' experience of grief. The purpose of this study was to investigate the grief experience of pediatric intensive care nurses when their patients die. A phenomenological method was used in this study in order to obtain rich descriptions of nurses' experience of grief within their workplace. The purposive sample consisted of six registered nurses employed in an intensive care unit in a university-teaching pediatric hospital. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the study participants in order to generate the data base. The audio-taped interviews were transcribed and analyzed for recurring themes emerging from the data according to the procedure outlined by Colaizzi. These nurses acknowledged they suffered multiple exposures to children's deaths and experienced grief. The interviews revealed eight themes that included one about their grief responses--hurting; two that described the influencing contextual factors--nurse-family unit relationship and dissonance, and five that related to coping strategies employed to manage their feelings of grief--self-expression, self-nurturance, termination of relationship activities, engaging in control taking activities and self-reflection. Further analysis revealed that managing grief effectively was an experiential learning process for the participants. The resultant themes were compared with the broader literature on grieving the loss of a significant other, grief and the health care professional, and the literature that addressed issues of occupational stress in the care of the critically ill, the dying, and the bereaved. The findings of this study could encourage further research that examines interventions designed to enhance the type of education and support needed in relation to the grief experience of nurses.