Encountering patients with cancer and their emotions as a nurse: A literature review.

Abstract

When encountering patients with cancer, nurses serve as the primary point of contact and require essential skills for meaningful interactions. Patients with cancer, especially those who are newly diagnosed, go through constant challenging time handling not only their physical but also their emotional health conditions. It is highly crucial that nurses are enabled to effectively work with patients’ emotions since the collaboration between nurses and patients creates a pivotal foundation for patients’ overall good treatments and for nurses’ efficiency.

The purpose of this literature review thesis is to gain knowledge of the existing scientific literature concerning the nurses' encountering role in providing emotional care to patients with cancer. Our objectives are to provide updated evidence-based information on the training needs of the nurses in encountering difficult emotions of patients with cancer and create a poster to a clinical guideline how nurses can encounter the emotions of patients with cancer to promote healing. Additionally, a poster guide was created as a collaborative product between SAMK and the local organization, STEPPI 2 Project from SataInno.

This thesis extensively documented the process of its literature review and presented the findings in detail. The topic was refined using the PICO model, the materials were sourced from PubMed, CINAHL, SAMK Finna, and Google Scholar, the articles were narrowed down with PRISMA Flowchart, and the data was analysed using inductive content analysis. Three themes were extracted from the chosen articles while simultaneously representing the areas of study under the results section.