Abstract

GALLEGO, Patrícia Barberá; PERES, Rodrigo Sanches  and  GOMES, Layla Raquel Silva. Breaking bad news: meanings attributed by hospital psychologists. Rev. SBPH [online]. 2023, vol.26, e002.  Epub June 24, 2024. ISSN 1516-0858.  https://doi.org/10.57167/rev-sbph.v26.523.

This study aimed to understand the meanings attributed to the breaking bad news by hospital psychologists. This is a clinical-qualitative study, in which participated 17 hospital psychologists who worked in the urgency and emergency sectors of Brazilian public general hospitals. The instruments used were a semi-structured interview and, specifically to obtain a professional profile of the participants, a self-administered questionnaire. The corpus was submitted to content analysis. Two categories were set up, and were entitled “The plate’s spinner” and “Just between us”. The first category added reports representative of meanings attributed by the participants to the difficulties that, for them, characterize situations of breaking bad news. The second category encompasses the participants’ point of view about the role of hospital psychologists in solving the expectations and needs of each person involved in breaking bad news. In summary, the results obtained indicate that, according to the participants, health professionals position themselves in different ways – predominantly suggesting antagonism rather than complementarity – regarding bad news, and it would be specifically up to hospital psychologists to embrace the emotional demands of patients and families, especially those that occur after the communicational action.

Keywords : Hospital psychology; Interpersonal communication; Health; Qualitative research.

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