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What are some of the strategies that will underpin that program ? How can staff work through the grief and loss they may be experiencing ? We looked at it at an individual level : What can you do at an individual level to support your mental health ? We also looked at what you can do at a team and a management level to support staff .
For instance , at an individual level , we ’ re looking at things that build resilience . We look at mindfulness , for instance , as a strategy for building resilience . We also look at gratitude as another strategy .
In relation to team and management strategies , we looked at the research . For example , most nurses find that peer support is very important and very helpful . While peer support can be encouraging and create that feeling of community among nurses , reflective practice actually helps enable growth .
What I mean by ‘ reflective practice ’ is actually thinking about what happened , and what you might do differently next time . That reflective practice will occur through employee assistance programs or talking to a counsellor , that type of thing .
You mentioned that mindfulness and gratitude are two individual strategies that staff can employ . How might they be used to manage workplace grief and loss in practice ? Well , I suppose they ’ re good strategies for your own mental health . What can happen sometimes is you might have a lot of losses and you start to think and focus on the negatives . For instance , with gratitude , it ’ s really about sitting down and reflecting on some of the good things that happened today too , not just the bad things , because we can get caught up in that negative thinking and then we can ’ t find the positives at all . Gratitude is a very useful strategy for all of us for our mental health , but you need to sometimes cultivate gratitude . You need to purposely reflect on it and think about it .
Mindfulness is , again , a good strategy for your mental health . It builds resilience , because often we ’ re so caught up in what we ’ re thinking about . It could be you had a bad day and you ’ re thinking about these things ; you go home and you ’ re still thinking about them . But you ’ re not turning off from that and enjoying family time or just enjoying your downtime . You ’ re living in your head and you ’ re reliving the events that you experienced that day . Mindfulness can give you that peace in a way ; it can give you a break from that constant mental chatter that sometimes can be quite destructive for us .
Why do you think so many nursing , health and aged care staff find peer support helpful ? I suppose I understand it as a nurse and why nurses find that sort of support helpful , because it ’ s your peers saying , “ You have done a good job ,” and they know the situation that you ’ re working in . Of course , as a nurse you ’ re surrounded by other nurses , so getting that immediate support from nurses is great because it reduces that isolation as well . I can understand why they ’ re so common and so popular among the nurses . As I said before , I think the important thing is that to enable growth , we need to reflect on our experiences . That might be outside of immediate peer support .
You are running a training workshop on this topic in October . What will that focus on ? We ’ re going to look at current grief and loss theory , and the concept of disenfranchised grief , which is something that nursing , health and aged care staff can experience because their grief is not acknowledged . For instance , if you ’ re working in aged care , you could be caring for a resident for a long time , because sometimes residents can be in aged care for long periods , and then that person dies . There might not be the time to focus on how you ’ re feeling when that person dies , and it can lead to this concept of disenfranchised grief , where the person doesn ’ t feel as if they have the right to grieve , yet they ’ ve had a relationship with that person .
We look at disenfranchised grief and we also look at the links between workplace grief and loss , burnout and mental health conditions .
Then , the last half of the program focuses on the strategy – what you can do at an individual level – including some of those things I was talking about before like mindfulness , gratitude , positive reframing , and what you can do as a team at a management level to support staff when they ’ re experiencing workplace grief and losses .
What other pieces of advice would you give to nursing , health and aged care staff who are dealing with workplace grief and loss ? It ’ s not abnormal to feel grief when a client or resident dies . It is important for you to be able to support your mental health by dealing with these situations . You can look at some individual strategies , you can make sure that you consider self-care . You might be working at a time when there ’ s a series of losses and it ’ s really having an impact on your mental health . Well , then you need to think about a few things . Are you getting enough exercise , or doing some exercise you really enjoy that ’ s good for your mental health ? What are you doing socially ? How is your inner health , whether it ’ s your spirituality or religion or whatever ?
Self-care is a concept that ’ s very well known to social workers and other healthcare staff , but less understood by nurses and aged care staff . For instance , there are self-care care plans that staff can complete too . If they encounter these situations , they can stop and reflect : “ Okay , I need to start thinking about how I ’ m looking after myself and what I should be doing .”
Self-care is important . You might develop some personally meaningful rituals that you adhere to when a client or a resident dies that you ’ re particularly attached to . Whether it ’ s just contacting the family , going to the funeral or participating in a memorial , they can certainly help build resilience . ■
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