When Nurses Become Patients. Validation of the Content of the Diagnostic Label Professional Traumatic Grief

(1) Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has put our healthcare systems to the test, exposing their vulnerability and demanding a high degree of commitment and dedication from healthcare teams to confront and contain the disease. In this sense, nursing professionals have played a prominent role in the treatment of complex cases that have required hospitalisation and have manifested pre-existing health complications or mortality. This unprecedented situation made it difficult to regulate the emotional impact and manage grief, often turning it into a traumatic grief whose psychological and emotional manifestations are increasingly evident but very little researched in the current context. (2) Purpose: Validation of the definition, defining characteristics and related factors for the proposal of the nursing diagnosis of professional traumatic grief. (3) Method: Based on Fehring’s content validation model, the label name, defining characteristics and other related factors were agreed upon by Spanish experts. (4) Results: The content validity index was 0.9068. A total of 21 defining characteristics were validated by the experts, as all of them scored above 0.6. With respect to the related factors of the proposed 10, all were validated. (5) Conclusion: The present study supports the proposal to develop a nursing diagnosis for professional traumatic grief. The use of standardised language is only the first step in establishing professional traumatic grief as a diagnostic category.

Housekeeping and the Phantom Ordinary

This chapter shifts focus away from the luminous images of Housekeeping to the lived experiences of traumatic grief those images often veil. The lyrical beauty of Housekeeping offers stylistic reinforcement of a first-person narrative that seeks consolation in immaterial forms. Critical focus on the transfigured ordinary and its aesthetic compensations tends to substantiate rather than interrogate the project of Ruth, focusing on the vibrancy and vitality of the images that she conjures rather than her terrifying expulsion from the everyday. Haunted by memories of maternal presence and incapable of resurrecting her mother, Robinson’s protagonist attempts to write herself out of the everyday world and into the spectral landscape in which her mother continues to exist; rendering her own embodied existence in ghostly terms, Ruth situates herself in a phantom ordinary. Housekeeping, I argue, subtly interrogates Ruth’s substitution of aesthetic images for ordinary presence in a way that anticipates the dramatic collapse of aesthetic consolation in Robinson’s later fiction.