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. 2022 Jun;40(2):108-122.
doi: 10.1177/08980101211017766. Epub 2021 May 28.

"They Stay With You": Nursing Home Staff's Emotional Experiences of Being in a Close Relationship With a Resident in Long-Term Care who Died

Anne Kristine Ådland  1 , Birgitta H Gripsrud  1 , Marta H Lavik  2   3   4   1 , Ellen Ramvi  1
Affiliations

"They Stay With You": Nursing Home Staff's Emotional Experiences of Being in a Close Relationship With a Resident in Long-Term Care who Died

Anne Kristine Ådland et al. J Holist Nurs. 2022 Jun.

Erratum in

Abstract

Aim: To explore and develop understanding of nursing home staff's emotional experiences of being in a close relationship with a resident in long-term care who later died. Design: Ethnographic fieldwork. Methods: As part of fieldwork, narrative interviews were conducted with nursing home staff (n = 6) in two nursing homes in Norway and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings: Through data analysis, we identified three superordinate themes: (1) wanting to be something good for the resident and their families, (2) striving to make sense of the resident's death, and (3) struggling to balance being personal and professional. Implications for holistic nursing and conclusion: Nursing home staff experience tensions between ideals of distanced professionalism and the emotional experience of proximity, evidenced by personal commitment and mutual recognition in relationships with "special residents" in long-term care. To support holistic practice, awareness is needed of the emotional impact of relationships on health professionals. Suppressing feelings puts staff at risk of moral distress, compassion fatigue, and burnout, as well as higher turnover and absenteeism. Managers should facilitate discussions on professionals' ideals of relationship-based practice, including processing of, and reflection on, emotional experiences in long-term care. Rituals to mark a resident's death can provide further emotional containment.

Keywords: death; emotions; ethics; holistic nursing; long-term care; nursing homes; professional–patient relationship.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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