The nursing hospice care: Critical incidents in managing the relationship with patients and their families

Abstract

The hospice care requires nurses to set an empathic but also uninvolved relationship with both the dying and their families. This requirement results in a challenging emotional work. Detecting relational difficulties in assisting terminal patients, the study presents the results of an analysis focused on the emotional work of nurses in hospice. Twenty-seven nurses voluntarily participated in an interview, realized with the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and aimed to investigate the conflicting lived regarded as critical incidents. All nurses are subject to continual emotional work to dissolve the dissonance between how intimately experienced and the implicit rules of the professional role, which seems to require their continuous surface acting. The palliative care model attaches great importance to the management of the emotional dimension in the relationship with the terminally ill patient and his family. Our research shows that this area is particularly critical and requires a constant burden for nurses. We believe that the emotional work is to find specific moments aimed at elaborating the emotional overload, from which compassion fatigue and burnout may depend.