Growth in caring and professional ethics in hospice

There is a continual growing concern and impetus being placed on comprehensive care and treatment of the individual from birth to death. There is also strong evidence to lead one to believe that humanization of health care delivery must include attention to the development of health workers who are academically, emotionally, and psychologically prepared to deal with the dying patient and the family. Health professionals must learn to cope with anxieties arising from such experiences. This requires an adjustment period for the professional, a time for adaption and a working through of one's own feelings about death, dying and life's end. In other words, health professionals must come to grips with their own feelings about their own mortality, life's end and the in-between life processes. This paper identifies six stages that the health professionals must go through in learning to be comfortable in working with terminal illnesses and catastrophic diseases. This involves the Harper Schematic Comfortability Growth and Development Scale as a conceptual framework in learning to care for the terminally ill and dying.