Condolence Letter in the Burn Unit

Abstract

Caring for family members after the death of a patient is essential for a good palliative care. Grief is a natural process that follows the family member's death. Up to 4% of general population may experience severe grief symptoms (Enez, 2018). A letter of condolence provides a humanist approach to care (Bedell et al., 2001), it can contribute to offer tribute to the deceased, and to be a source of comfort to bereaved relatives (Wolfson & Menkin, 2003) but did not alleviate grief symptoms because of a condolence letter may be insufficient to provide benefits on relatives' bereaved (Kentish- Barnes, Chevret, et al., 2017). Although relatives could describes benefits of receiving a letter of condolence, the bereavement follow-up has to be adjusted to each individual situation (Kentish-Barnes, Cohen-Solal, et al., 2017).We conducted a preliminary study to describe the use of condolence letters in the burns unit. All relatives of patients who died in the unit were eligible to receive a letter of condolence. Exclusion criteria were patients admitted for less than 24 hr, disagreements with the health care team, or unacknowledged relationships between patient and relatives. A formal condolence letter was sent with recommended guidelines (Bedell et al., 2001;Wolfson & Menkin, 2003). A total of 13 burn patients were death at the unit from October 2020 to April 2022. The median age of patients was 75 years (range: 53-96); there were five men (41.7%). The mean duration of hospital stay was 18.25 days (SD: 17.5; range 2-55), and total burn surface area was 32% (SD: 26; range 3-80).Twelve condolence letters were sent to patient's relatives, one of this was excluded because of family problems. In relatives, there were seven men (58.3%), relationships to patients were described as child (N ¼ 7; 63.7%), brother/ sister (N ¼ 3; 27.3%), and granddaughter (N ¼ 1; 9%). Two relatives responded to the condolence letter through one phone call and one visit to the department.In this study, although little agreement was found about the appropriateness of condolence letter by bereaved families in the burns unit, it put forward that condolence letter was a support at end-of-life with integrated care for patients and their relatives, provide nonintrusive support to relatives, and validate emotional experience of the bereaved relatives. Moreover, adding value to interdisciplinary approaches, because of the intervention with the burned patient, is a laborious process that requires working with different disciplines.