Bereavement Needs Assessment in Nurses: Elaboration and Content Validation of a Professional Traumatic Grief Scale

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a series of biopsychosocial repercussions among nursing professionals. The impossibility of anticipating the events, the numerous deaths, the excessive workload, the lack of personal health and the necessary means of protection made it difficult to regulate the impact and the elaboration of grief to the point of becoming, on many occasions, a traumatic grief whose physical and psychological manifestations are becoming more and more evident. The main objective of this research was to develop a scale for a group of symptoms based on professional traumatic grief. The development consisted of two phases: (I) instrument design through a literature review and focus groups of bereavement experts and healthcare professionals who experience the grief process in their work; and (II) validation of the content of the instrument. A total of 25 final items were established as suitable for inclusion in the instrument. It is expected that the experiences and results obtained through the development and validation of a scale of specific symptomatology of professional traumatic grief in health professionals will allow the assessment and detection of symptomatology in order to develop programs and strategies for early intervention and prevention.

Validation of the healthcare workers’ version of the Pandemic Grief Scale among frontline nursing professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea

“…However, the emotional toll of working with patients who die of an infectious disease, such as COVID-19, is particularly high for healthcare professionals ( 5 ). Nurses experience a range of emotional responses, such as sadness, helplessness, loss, and guilt, when a patient they work with dies ( 24 ). They not only grieve over the loss of patients but also feel guilty about their patients’ deaths given that they consider these losses as failures of their medical treatment ( 25 ).…”