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Health care professionals experience grief when caring for children with life-threatening conditions. Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, the pediatric palliative care program of the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, created an action plan to support health care professionals; one intervention - the bereavement debriefing session - was specifically aimed at providing emotional support and increasing one's ability to manage grief. A structured format for conducting bereavement debriefing sessions was developed, and 113 sessions were held in a three-year period; data were collected to capture themes discussed. Bereavement debriefing sessions were conducted most frequently after unexpected deaths or deaths of long-term patients. Though attendance included all disciplines, nurses attended the sessions most often. Self-report evaluation forms revealed that health care professionals found the sessions helpful. Bereavement debriefing sessions can be one aspect of an effective approach to supporting health care professionals in managing their grief in caring for children with life-threatening conditions.
Caring for children with lifethreatening conditions can have a profound effect on health care professionals. Without the ability to manage one's grief in response to the death of a patient, health care professionals may experience physical, emotional, cognitive, behavior, or spiritual distress, which could have implications for their professional practice (Behnke, Reiss, Neimeyer, & Bandstra, 1987; Davies, 1996; Papadatou, 2000).
As part of a quality improvement project to improve care of children with life-threatening conditions, the pediatric palliative care program of Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Harriet Lane Compassionate Care, created an action plan to support health care professionals in their care of dying children. The approach consisted of four interventions that are described elsewhere (Rushton et al., 2006); this article focuses on one intervention - bereavement debriefing sessions - which are specifically aimed at providing emotional support and increasing one's ability to manage grief. Although data collection started with the quality improvement project funded by the Education Development Center, bereavement debriefing sessions have continued as an on-going intervention to support health care professionals at Johns Hopkins Children's Center.
Review of Literature
The opportunity for health care professionals to process personal and professional responses to a patient's death seems to be important yet lacking (McCoyd & Walter, 2007; Serwint, 2004). One structured process developed from efforts to reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms for trauma workers: Critical Incident...