Qualitative Critique Paper
Neetaka Dickens
University of Phoenix Analysis of Research Reports NUR/518 July 28, 2014 Veta Massey

Qualitative Critique
The purpose of the paper is analyze and critique the qualitative nursing research study related to a current nursing issue. A review of the strengths and weaknesses of this study and appropriateness of the studies for the clinical issue is included. While there is an impact of death on family members, there has been little research documenting the reactions and responses of our nurses.
A Curtain of Protection
Grief is defined as “keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; or painful regret“(Merriam-Webster,2014). Every person in the world has suffered from grief at one point or another in their life, whether it was caused by the loss of a loved one or another reason it has been felt by them. Different people express grief in different ways; it can often bring people together as well as divide them. This is the same for our nurses. One of the nursing functions of an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurse is providing care for terminally-ill patients and assists them towards a peaceful death. However, in helping those patients to approach a peaceful death in an intensive care unit, nurses deal with many difficulties such as communicating bad news, counseling the persons’ families, and facilitating a peaceful death when time is limited. ICU nurses frequently face patients’ death and endure not only stressful, physically tiring and culturally challenging but also psychologically and emotionally draining environment which lead them to experience grief. Caring for terminally-ill patients can cause tension, conflict, moral distress, grief, and suffering for critical care nurses that affect job satisfaction and lead nurses to feel burned out (De Castro, 2010). Grief is a human emotion that we must all go through. We have points in our lives when we must deal with grief and we must come through the other side with the lessons that we have learned. As a nurse today, I see death all around me. Some may not believe, but when there is a loss of one of my patients, I grieve along with the family. This is normal, but unfortunately some of my co-workers, such as the nurses in the article, do not believe that it can be professional. I find that grieving with my patients and with the family is part of the healing process.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Study
Qualitative research is about exploring issues, understanding phenomena, and answering questions by analyzing and making sense of unstructured data. Qualitative research regards truth as a subjective reality, not a objective reality. In this article reviewed, Creating a curtain of protection: Nurses’ experiences of grief following patient death, those methods were used. The purpose of this study was to describe the lived experience of nurses surrounding the death of their patients.
Registered nurses have long provided end-of-life care and support to adult and pediatric patients and their families. While the impact of death on family members has been well documented in the literature, the reaction, response, and grieving process of nurses during and following the death of a patient has not been researched extensively. A qualitative phenomenologic design using Heideggerian hermeneutical methods were used in this study. Phenomenologic research has been described as the “quest for what it means to be human” (Munhall, 2007, p. 163). The participants for this study consisted of 11 nurses recruited through purposive sampling. The sample size of 11 was congruent with other studies that have used phenomenology and was numerous enough to learn new meanings. Nurses who had experienced the death of a patient for whom they had cared were eligible to participate in the study without regard to geographic location, nursing practice specialty, age of subject, or age of patient at death. An introductory letter describing the research and inviting participation along with a verbal introduction of the study was provided to all potential participants prior to obtaining written informed consent (Gerow, 2010). The researchers used in-depth interviewing to investigate the lived experiences of nurses following patient death. A semi-structured interview guide was used to focus the interviews and ensure consistency among the five researchers who collected data. The focus of the interview was the participant’s perceptions, experiences, feelings, and actions surrounding the death of a patient. The data collected was trustworthy and proved to be credible, dependable, confirmedable, and authentic. The study showed that the lived experiences of nurses surrounding the death of a patient were characterized by nurses creating a “curtain of protection” to mitigate the grieving process and allow them to provide supportive nursing care. The findings of this study add to the existing but limited body of research regarding the grieving process of nurses. Results of this study support other study results that nurses’ grief resulting from the death of a patient is different from the grief experienced by family members at the death of a loved one. There were some limitations to this study. This data collected relied on self reporting from the nurses. Some may not have reported at all. Although the data was collected by five students, it only analyzed two of students’ findings. This could cause it to be incomplete. This study identified four themes related to the grief experiences and ways of coping following the death of a patient for 11 registered nurses from a variety of practice specialties. Further study is needed to determine whether the level of support and education participants received prior to and after their experiences impacted their grieving (Gerow,2010). Nurses experienced conflicting feelings in caring for dying patients. While they felt the responsibility to give the best care possible to patients and their families, they did not believe they were supposed to grieve when the patient died. The nurses in the study had consistently struggled with the belief that as professionals they were not supposed to feel the loss but were to simply say goodbye and move on to the next patient.
This article had a good abstract which offered a clear overview of the study, including the research problem, sample, methods, findings, and recommendations. This article had also a good size of the reference section, some recent and some not so recent. The phenomenon of the study of nurses response to death and grieving was clearly identified and was interesting. The purpose, methods, ethical considerations, data collection strategies was clearly identified. The authors display their purpose of the study as well accomplished their objective. I believe that this article have nurses and other medical personnel as an intended audience, and is written in an appropriate style. The authors defined their terms which made it easier to follow the studies related to nurses and grieving.

Reference
De Castro, Melvin. The Lived Experience of Intensive care Unit Nurses on Grief and Coping Following Patient’s Death. Retrieved July 25, 2014, from http://melvindecastro.blogspot.com/2011/10/abstract_7268.html
Gerow, L., Conejo, P., Alonzo, A., Davis, N., Rodgers, S., & Domian, E. W. (2010). Creating a curtain of protection: Nurses’ experiences of grief following patient death. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(2), 122-129.
Grief. (n.d.). Retrieved July 25, 2014, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grief
Munhall, P.L. (2007). Nursing research: A qualitative perspective (4th ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett.