Healthcare provider bereavement, part I
Healthcare providers may develop intense and caring relationships with their patients, particularly those they work with long-term, and these can be inadvertently draining. The inability to address the mental trauma that can accompany professional loss may lead to the hiding of healthcare providers’ emotional responses to death, and it is risky to ignore the importance of death in one’s life. While trying to reduce suffering and death, they may be unable to work through their own grief. Because of the lack of community seen amongst different units in medical facilities, there may be a feeling of “otherness” when negative patient events occur, and the provider needs support from both management and peers. In many facilities, practice is becoming more task-oriented with little room for critical thinking, disallowing development of personal medical values, control over practice, and personal reward for accomplishments, all acts that increase passion for the job.
Regularly exposed to human trauma, people involved in the care of critically ill patients regularly have moderate to high levels of secondary trauma. Despite this, they often feel as though they are not permitted to display mourning and remain professional in the eyes of management, peers, and other patients not to mention society at large. The lead-up to a patient’s death and the death itself may be completely overwhelming but unaddressed due to the blinding of emotion to avoid perceived vulnerability and unprofessionalism. Active grieving is completely thrown to the wayside. Combined with a lack of community with peers which leads to a fragmented support network, this hidden trauma has a great chance of causing attrition, something that has been seen on a large scale during the COVID pandemic.
Unaddressed pain and suffering do not simply go away but rather grow, potentially affecting the whole body and mind. Reliving of primary and secondary trauma can lead to depersonalization in providers experiencing burnout, but they feel that people outside of healthcare will not understand what is happening to them mentally, and as always, many healthcare providers feel they will be perceived as unprofessional or even a failure if they grieve openly at work.
