| The hospice setting is an end of life healthcare setting for terminally ill patients, especially those with a life expectancy of less than six months. The hospice setting is one in which care is primarily comfort-oriented, including palliative medicine and pastoral care, and is focused on providing emotional and psychological support for both the patient and his family. The experience of the hospice worker is not well understood, as it is not as commonly studied as the experiences of other types of medical care workers. The world of the hospice worker is often a secret one, hidden from the outside due to our collective discomfort with the personal experience of death. As a result of this discomfort, the experience of the hospice worker is not well understood and does not have a strict psychological foundation or description within the existing literature. This research seeks to develop a description of the lived experience of the hospice worker using Giorgi's phenomenological method. The approach chosen relies on long-form phenomenological interviews with workers in four hospice care centers in a specific location. It describes the phenomenological experience that the workers identify based on their own words and processes of thought, rather than imposing external models or frameworks that do not exist. The findings of this research are that many workers come to the hospice setting through personal experience with hospice, and many work on a volunteer basis. However, others begin their career there, and others are associated with the hospice through their other professional associations, such as oncology centers. The participants reported a variety of challenges in their work, including emotional burdens and the problem of dealing with families, who can often be challenging. A minority of workers reported symptoms of emotional exhaustion and burnout, while others reported that their emotional labor was fulfilling and supporting. Overall, most of the participants reported that the benefits outweighed the cost of working in the hospice, although a few reported that they were considering leaving the profession. The significance of this research is that it offers a phenomenological view into the world of hospice and the worker experience. Of particular interest is the value of emotional labor to the participants, many of whom expressed that it filled some of their own emotional needs as well as those of their patients. |
