Effectiveness of blog writing intervention for promoting subjective well-being, resilience, and post-traumatic growth of palliative care nurses

Introduction: Nurses in palliative care (PC) and end-of-life care settings are at increased risk for trauma, distress, and suffering leading to poor resilience and well-being outcomes. The recent pandemic further exposed PC nurses to experience poor mental, emotional, and existential health and well-being resulting in increased turnover, poor retention, and job satisfaction among nurses in clinical and community practice settings around the globe. Expressive writing interventions are shown to promote self-reflection, personal growth, and resilience when facing adverse life events and disaster situations. This study aims to test the effectiveness of a self-reflexive blog writing intervention to promote subjective well-being, resilience, and post-traumatic growth of nurses in palliative care settings within the US during the pandemic.

Methods: A pre-and post-test design was used to test and evaluate the acceptability, utility, and effectiveness of the reflexive blog writing intervention guided by SOPHIE (Self-exploration on Ontological, Phenomenological, Humanistic, Ideological, and Existential) approach in promoting resilience, post-traumatic growth, and subjective well-being among palliative care nurses. Fifty-seven nurses working in palliative and hospice care settings participated in the study. Pre-and-post online Qualtrics surveys were completed before and after administering the intervention. Participants in the intervention group were asked to write weekly blogs for four weeks using an online SOPHIE-guided blog-writing template. Descriptive statistics and t-test were used to describe the study sample and compare the means while ANCOVA; was used to control study covariates that might influence the study outcomes. and compare the means of outcome variables such as subjective well-being, resilience, and post-traumatic growth in both groups.

Results: A significant difference was seen in the mean scores of subjective well-being and resilience among the participants in the blog writing intervention group. We did not see any significant changes in post-traumatic growth post-intervention. Post-survey analysis of descriptive data revealed that most participants found blog writing intervention helpful and a supportive tool to express their anxiety, trauma, and distress.

Conclusions: The reflexive blog writing intervention guided by SOPHIE foster self-reflection and was found to be useful and effective in improving subjective well-being and resilience among nurses in palliative care settings during the pandemic. The particular intervention can be used among nurses in both clinical and community palliative care settings. Organizational policies and practices should encourage and implement similar initiatives to improve coping and wellbeing that can eventually increase job satisfaction and retention rates among nurses. Future studies are needed to test the intervention on a larger scale to further test its effectiveness and applicability in palliative care settings.