workforce
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.
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
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 a nd 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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