Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Corso di laurea in infermieristica - Sede di Modena

Abstract

The bad news is defined in literature as "any condition that changes in a pejorative sense the way in which the patient thinks about his future". In the process of its communication also the nurse is involved but his role and area of expertise are not well defined. The main purpose of this literature review is to analyze the phenomenon of bad news communication, analysing the role of the nurse and his area of expertise. The second goal is to investigate the communication strategies that the nurse can use to deliver bad news, the difficulties which he can experience and finally his perception about his own preparation. The literary research, conducted on four databases Cinhal, Scopus, Psycinfo and PubMed, made it possible to find 612 articles and, in a first phase, only 18 of them were selected. The articles were critically evaluated with the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool scale, which led to the inclusion of 17 studies. The results showed that the nurse plays several key roles before, after and during the communication of bad news, in different contexts from the hospital to the territorial one. The communication strategies identified were few and during the communication of bad news nurses have reported several difficulties. Some of these are related to the lack of an appropriate environment and of a supportive organizational context, to family decisions, to the patient’s emotional reactions and finally to the personal factors of the nurse. The lack of training is a further difficulty; the studies revealed the use of role-play and periodic debriefing sessions as possible training strategies. Future researches might concern new training activities and the evaluation of communication strategies and their effectiveness in clinical practice.