Supporting oncology nurses: introduction to a new program based on meaning and mindfulness — ASN Events

Supporting oncology nurses: introduction to a new program based on meaning and mindfulness (#582)

Lise Fillion 1 , Melanie Vachon 2 3 , Christine Goyette 2 3 , Patricia Dobkin 4
  1. Nursing, Laval University, Quebec city, Qc, Canada
  2. UQAM, Montreal, Que, Canada
  3. CRISE, Montreal, Que, Canada
  4. Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Oncology and palliative care nurses are commonly faced with different emotional stressors such as: repeated grief, death confrontation or witness of patients and families’ suffering. Most importantly, those emotional stressors are embedded into organizational context in which the staff are exposed to organizational and professional stressors of various kinds. In order to support oncology and palliative care nurses, an existential group-intervention, based on meaning-making, has been developed and tested by Fillion et al. (2006). The first objective of this presentation is to report the accumulated empirical evidence on this existential intervention (Fillion et al. 2006-2011). The strengths and limitations of the intervention will be discussed. Based on our previous findings, we suggest that a mindfulness approach, combined with the existential approach, would be helpful to support oncology and palliative nurses. Therefore, our second objective is to present the empirical and theoretical bases of a Mindfulness approach to supplement the existential intervention. To this end, scientific studies on stress reduction as well as humanistic and theoretical foundations of the concept of presence will be underpinned. We will also present our participative research program that aims at implementing this new intervention on a specialised palliative care unit.Â