title: [Parents' grief at the loss of a premature infant and approaches to their care].
abstract: The more than 3,000 deaths of premature infants due to low weight in Taiwan cause deep personal grief in their parents, for whom there is no pain greater than losing a child. This loss, nearly always sudden and unexpected, is an issue often ignored by clinic nursing staff. The purpose of this paper was to consider various grief counseling theories in order to help nurses attend to the grief counseling needs of parents who lose a premature infant. Better understanding of parents' grief responses by nursing staffs will help nurses to accept and address such. Grief processes identified include: shock and numbness, searching and yearning, disorientation and reorganization. Grief responses include: feel, physiology and sense organs, cognition and behavior. The four tasks essential to grief recovery include: to accept the reality of the loss, to work through the pain of grief, to adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing, and to emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life. Coaching through grief counseling theory puts forward and looks after concrete measures, and provides three suggestions for the parents who lose a premature infant. These can be used as reference by clinical staffs, help promote nursing staff understanding of this topic, help improve care for grieving parents and improve care quality.
authors.affiliation: Department of Nursing Mackay Memorial Hospital, ROC. ac560103@ms32.hinet.net
authors.forename: Hsiu-Mei
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001293:Attitude to Death; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007234:Infant, Premature; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D011368:Professional-Family Relations