Nursing care focuses on the care and interventions that should be provided to clients/patients in response to their complaints.
Nurses also provide grief counseling to patients who have had ordeals, such as the loss of a loved one (Butcher & Wagner, 2013).
Sometimes grief leads to depression, especially when the client who has suffered a loss has not accepted reality.
A change in sleeping patterns, a lack of happiness, and difficulties managing anger are all signs of depression. My essay will focus on the stages of grievance and the techniques employed by nurses on mourning patients, namely counselling. Finally, I'll weigh in on whether or not counseling is necessary. Grieving is classified according to stages. The stages involved run from the day of loss all through to the day where one gets over the loss and returns to normal living. Periods of stages depend on clients based on the impacts that the said losses had on them. The general grieving stages as per Kubler Ross are described below.
Protest or Denial Stage
At the protest stage, there is a lack of acceptance pertaining the loss. This stage is characterized by ambivalence, anger and crying. At the denial stage, the affected people do not get in terms with the news, and the main question at this stage is how life will go on without the lost person (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
In the denial stage, you are not living in the actual reality but rather in a preferable reality where you hope it is all a case of mistaken identity. Interestingly, though we often deny it, denial and shock help us survive and cope grieving events (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Denial helps us cope with grief as it aids our body mechanisms to handle the loss in bits rather than once, by the time we get to terms with the situation completely, the healing process has already begun hence depression implications are subsided. The protest stage is the first of the grieving stages encountered by anyone suffering a loss (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Anger Stage
In the anger stage, an affected person has begun to live in actual reality rather than preferable reality. At the anger stage questions such as “why me” are common. At this stage anger builds in, you will experience anger management problems and you might redirect your anger to any persons surrounding you (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Health researchers agree that anger is a necessary element for this stage and they suggest that you should not hold back your anger for it to quickly dissipate and to hasten the recovery process. Anger should be taken as a strength to guide you back to reality i.e. when you feel alone, the direction of anger towards another person will bring you to reality and connect you with the people again (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Bargaining Stage
The bargaining stage is full of false hope where you lie to yourself that you can change the grief process through a type of negotiation with whatever supernatural beings i.e. God. The negotiations are normally with an aim to get life to how it was before the grieving situation arrived. At this stage, you are willing to make a vast life change in an attempt towards normality (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Depression
Depression is a present emotion that is classified as a form of grief as it is immediately associated with grief. Depression represents the vacuum created in reality when we realize that a situation is over or a person has left. In this stage, one might feel that the world is too overwhelming to cope with. Suicidal thoughts come in at this stage (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Acceptance
Acceptance stage is recognized as the last of the grieving stages, here, emotions begin to stabilize and you are dawned to reality. Although the reality is not a good thing, you agree to whatever is to come your way. This period is regarded as a time of adjustments and readjustments (Rose & Kessler, 2014).
Nursing Care Plan for Persons Experiencing Grief
Grieving patients mostly end up being depressed patients if they do not seek medical attention with time. The type of attention they majorly require is counseling which is offered by counseling nurses specialized in the field (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
Assessment
On arrival at the healthcare facility, the responsible counseling nurse will assess the depressed patient by conducting interviews in a friendly manner and with a lot of concern in order to get the patient to open up on whatever might have got him/her depressed. He will also assess the level of depression the patient has reached (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
Diagnosis
At this stage, the nurse through the interviews conducted identifies the type of depression associated with the patient i.e. change in sleeping patterns, anger management issues and even if the patient is having suicidal thoughts then formulates a plan to use in counseling the patient with relevance to the depression levels at the time of counseling. He also familiarizes with the causes of the depression (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
Counseling
The nurse in concern formulates a counseling schedule effective for both him and the patient, he will plan on counseling sessions which are aimed at bringing the patient back to a normal living full of happiness. If the patient’s case is that of losing a loved one, the nurse may pick biblical phrases that talk about death and use them to convince that death is a normal event for all living persons (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
The counseling nurse should incorporate active listening and sympathy at all times to increase the level of concern which makes the patient sincere and to also feel some notions of care If he/she had earlier felt like no one cared about him or her. The nursing counselor should also avoid all forms of prejudgment and conclusions to avoid biasness (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
The counseling nurse may also use his/her previous loss experiences in encouraging the patient that everything will be fine and that problems do not last. When change is noted the nurse may also implement breaks in between talks in which he will participate in a game of interest to the patient as a way to divert the patient's mind from the ordeal (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
Evaluation
After a couple of sessions, the counselor should evaluate if there is a form of improvement on the patient. If there is then it proves that the counseling is effective and if not then the counselor should formulate another counseling strategy. If at all the depression had elevated to causing health hazards such as blood pressure, medication should be delivered first and counseling to follow suit as soon as the patient is feeling better (MacPherson & Spackman, 2013).
Conclusion
Counseling is necessary as it helps depressed patients resume their normal livelihoods full of happiness. Depression snatches happiness from patients and is majorly mental and psychological caused hence counseling has been proved as the most effective and efficient way to combat depression. I conclude that counseling is relevant in tackling depression problems and should be implemented vastly.
References
Butcher, H. K., Bulechek, G. M., Dochterman, J. M. M., & Wagner, C. (2013). Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC)-E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.
Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2014). On grief and grieving: Finding the meaning of grief through the five stages of loss. Simon and Schuster.
MacPherson, H., Richmond, S., Bland, M., Brealey, S., Gabe, R., Hopton, A., ... & Spackman, E. (2013). Acupuncture and counselling for depression in primary care: a randomised controlled trial. PLoS medicine, 10(9), e1001518.
