Oncology and palliative care nurses are commonly faced
with different emotional stressors such as: repeated grief, death confrontation
or witness of patients and families’ suffering. Most importantly, those
emotional stressors are embedded into organizational context in which the staff
are exposed to organizational and professional stressors of various kinds. In
order to support oncology and palliative care nurses, an existential group-intervention,
based on meaning-making, has been developed and tested by Fillion et al.
(2006). The first objective of this presentation is to report the accumulated empirical
evidence on this existential intervention (Fillion et al. 2006-2011). The
strengths and limitations of the intervention will be discussed. Based on our
previous findings, we suggest that a mindfulness approach, combined with the
existential approach, would be helpful to support oncology and palliative
nurses. Therefore, our second objective is to present the empirical and
theoretical bases of a Mindfulness approach to supplement the existential
intervention. To this end, scientific studies on stress reduction as well as
humanistic and theoretical foundations of the concept of presence will
be underpinned. We will also present our participative
research program that aims at implementing this new intervention on a
specialised palliative care unit.Â