Behind the doors of home hospice patients: A secondary qualitative analysis of hospice nurse communication with patients and families.

OBJECTIVE: Hospice nurses frequently encounter patients and families under tremendous emotional distress, yet the communication techniques they use in emotionally charged situations have rarely been investigated. In this study, researchers sought to examine hospice nurses' use of validation communication techniques, which have been shown in prior research to be effective in supporting individuals experiencing emotional distress. METHOD: Researchers performed a directed content analysis of audiorecordings of 65 hospice nurses' home visits by identifying instances when nurses used validation communication techniques and rating the level of complexity of those techniques. RESULT: All nurses used validation communication techniques at least once during their home visits. Use of lower level (i.e., more basic) techniques was more common than use of higher level (i.e., more complex) techniques. SIGNIFICANCE OF RESULTS: Although hospice nurses appear to use basic validation techniques naturally, benefit may be found in the use of higher level techniques, which have been shown to result in improved clinical outcomes in other settings.

Rethinking family caregiving: tailoring cognitive-behavioral therapies to the hospice experience.

Hospice family caregivers experience significantly higher rates of psychological distress than demographically similar noncaregivers. Interventions based on cognitive-behavioral therapy have been shown to reduce psychological distress in the general population by providing tools to modify thinking patterns that directly affect emotions and behavior. Such interventions might reasonably be incorporated into hospice social work; however, numerous contextual factors must be taken into account to ensure that any interventions are appropriate to the unique needs of clients. The purpose of the study discussed in this article was to contex- tualize one aspect of the cognitive-behavioral model based on firsthand accounts of hospice family caregivers. Following a modified grounded theory approach, researchers engaged in a secondary analysis of data from a larger study provided in a subsample of 90 audio-recorded conversations between hospice family caregivers and interventionists. Findings indicated that distressed caregivers engaged in five dominant thinking patterns: (1) "should" statements, (2) catastrophizing or minimizing, (3) personalizing, (4) absolute thinking, and (5) making assumptions. Implementing cognitive-behavioral therapies based on identified caregiver thinking patterns will allow hospice social workers to empower caregivers to cope more effectively with the numerous stressors they encounter while caring for a dying loved one.