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The Sense of Professional Failure and Helplessness of Nurses Working in Palliative Care.
BENEŠ, Jiří
The thesis deals with the effects of professional failure and helplessness experienced by nurses working in palliative care. The objectives of this thesis were to find out whether nurses often suffer from the negative feelings, to examine the influence of the job on their personal lives, to identify the most common problems related to their jobs and to find out if they regret choosing this type of job. To achieve these objectives, the following questions were asked: What is the influence of palliative care environment on nurses' lives and personalities? What factors influence nurses' professional performance? Why did they choose this type of job? What are the most stressful situations they experience? Does the workload make them feel helpless? What helps the nurses cope with stressful situations? We used qualitative research methods and conducted half structured interviews with fifteen research participants; eight of them work in non-hospice palliative care and seven participants work in hospices. The research results showed that palliative care has an influence on nurses' personal lives to a large extent; however, not only in negative ways. The research participants find their jobs mentally demanding and hard to separate from personal lives but they do not regret choosing the job. The participants responded that they often feel helpless but not hopeless. The feeling of failure is rather rare and occurs only under specific conditions. The most common and serious problems the participants encounter were characterized as conflicts at work, work stress, patient´s worsening state of health or patient's death, communication with family of a patient who passed away, big responsibility, misunderstandings with patients or their families, taking care of confused or aggressive patients and of patients with persisting pain, death of a young patient, patient's inability to find reconciliation with their condition or patient's unawareness of their state of health. This thesis also outlines a close relationship between high demands of palliative care and burnout syndrome and could be used for further research on this topic. Simultaneously, the data received from the research participants provides an analysis of palliative care nurses' feelings and work satisfaction and will be communicated to the management of given facilities. The findings of this work could be also presented at a conference in the future.
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