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Cancer diagnoses and treatments can be crisis-causing events that overwhelm the usual coping abilities of patients and their families. Oncology nurses constantly are observing and attending to patients' diverse needs, ranging from biomedical to emotional, social, and psychological. Nurses have the chance to be first responders in times of patient crises, as they are in the position to recognize the crisis, respond effectively, and transform the crisis into a pivotal learning experience. This article discusses a way to think about patient and family crises that empowers nurses to respond in a manner appropriate to the cultural context and respectful of the individual space of the patient.
Emily Chase, RN, MS, OCN®
Emily Chase, RN, MS, OCN®, is a staffnurse in the James Comprehensive Cancer Center at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. The author takes full responsibility for the content of the article. No financial relationships relevant to the content of this article have been disclosed by the author or editorial staff. Chase can be reached at [email protected], with copy to editor at [email protected].
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1188/13.CJON.337-339
The following has been adapted with permission from the Oncology Nursing Society's Transcultural Nursing Issues Special Interest Group newsletter from January 2012 (Vol. 12, Issue 1).
Patients in crisis provide nurses with an opportunity to help people in a way that few others can. In this article, the term crisis is used in a manner inspired by Parad and Caplan (1960) and later simplified by Gilliland and James (2013) in their Crisis Intervention Strategies textbooks. Crisis is not a situation itself but the perception and response of an individual who is facing a threatening situation and realizes that his or her usual coping strategies are not going to resolve the issue to an acceptable degree, therefore causing a precipitous rise in tension. More simply, crisis is characterized by an individual not seeing a way to effectively solve a problem that affects him or her directly or even indirectly. Oncology nurses regularly see how the diagnosis of cancer and aspects of cancer treatment are crisis-causing situations, ones that can overwhelm the usual coping abilities of an individual or family. Stressors include the initial diagnosis, delayed diagnosis, fear of recurrence, physical changes because of treatment,...