Breaking Bad News

Breaking Bad News

Introduction

Today we live in a society where we can find bad news in any context, on the news, the press, work, family, friends ... and that we are creating desensitization to misfortunes of others. But this notion changes qualitatively when we talk about health of self, family or friends, since it will affect us in a unique way. From the health point of view, the definition of bad news is that is most widely accepted throughout the nursing clinical profession is one by Buckman (1992, pp. 129-142). According to him, a bad news is a type of communication "which will change seriously or adversely on the patient's perspective future.” A relatively more complete definition is that of Ptacek who defines the act of breaking bad news as in the context of nursing as "any communication related to the health care process which involves the perception of physical threat or mental, and exceeded risk of seeing their own abilities in terms of lifestyle established objectively or subjectively there is little chance of coping with recent negative event " 2 Authors like Munoz Almanza have understood the communication of bad news (CMN) from the terms of adaptation and tells us that "there is a link between bad news and coping capacity deployment "3, Which is "the confrontation with an unusual hardship in a situation in which the development of new strategies and implementation of new behaviours is required "4. At the same time, this is introduced into the communication framework, which, in the health sciences, will go beyond the simple transmission of information considered as "the art and technique to inform, influence and motivate an individual about public, institutional and collective health-related issues (Healthy People, 2010).

As we can see, speaking of CMN we face a complex act that requires an approach integrated by the practitioner who is involved, since they are not human behaviour precisely characterized by its simplicity. Therefore, a physician or nurse must have the required knowledge and training for such intervention. Given this uncertainty, there has been plenty of literature on the subject. A review literature published in 1998 by Almanza Munoz about CMN covering literature from 1978 onwards, shows how the majority of those publications were a result frustration of a lack of preparation in the field. 

This paper aims to critically reflect upon the incident of the incident of braking, delivering or communicating bad news to a newly diagnosed COPD patient by utilising the reflective models of Johns (1996) and Gibbs (1988, pp. 69-97) and describe how nurses can use, in their area of clinical practice, reflections to extend their understanding and skills which will be helpful in the event of breaking bad news and engaging in not so easy conversation with patients who is recently diagnosed with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The paper also shed some light on how the application of reflective models in nursing practices especially regarding the even of breaking bad news help a nurse to:

Identify an event clinical setting that has the potential to give rise to break or deliver bad news to all the patients ...