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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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