O luto profissional nos enfermeiros (original) (raw)

The increasing contact of nurses with death, in a professional context, has often been perceived in a negative way because of the emotional difficulties involved and the overload consequences on health professionals that lead to processes of relational avoidance and of social and professional isolation. Over and above mourning overload, daily exposure to death and to the dying process may be a challenge to nurses' personal and professional growth. Dealing with death and the dying process is essentially a task of facing loss through a process that sticks between avoidance and intrusion. The way the health professionals develop the process of professional mourning is shaped by sociodemographic, personal, situational and organizational variables, practice and professional training, meaningful personal and professional life experiences. These different determinants of health professionals' personal and professional life shape their personal and existential beliefs and perspectives on the meaning of life, on anxiety and the general attitude towards death. Thus it influences the process of professional mourning. This study aims at evaluating the consequences of professional mourning in order to build training training strategies focused on overload mourning prevention; it also faces professional mourning as an incentive to personal and professional growth. In a first phase we constructed and validated an instrument for measuring overload of professional mourning (SLP), we called insulated mourning. Four fundamental dimensions emerged from the factor analysis: tormented confinement, emotional effort to care, nostalgic loss and misunderstood sharing. In a second phase we tried to identify the factors that interfere in the process of professional mourning. This is a quantitative, transversal, descriptive, correlative study. We have studied an accidental sample of 360 nurses: they are 70.6% of all nurses in services of internal medicine, oncology, hematology and palliative care of five health institutions in the District of Lisbon.