In the News

MEDICAL CARE - Program helps South Shore Hospital staff cope with stress (video in story)

(To view the story on The Patriot Ledger website and watch the accompanying video, click here. )

By SUE SCHEIBLE
The Patriot Ledger

WEYMOUTH - The former semi-pro football player had nurse Valerie Griffiths pinned against the wall in the South Shore Hospital emergency department.

Weighing 360 pounds and standing 6 feet 4 inches tall, he had arrived pale, sweaty and complaining of chest pain. As Griffiths was taking his blood pressure, he had an apparent heart attack and fell forward onto her.

She could barely move, but with her free arm she called ‘‘code blue in triage’’ over the public address system. Within a minute, Robert Abbadessa, another nurse, had run in with a defibrillator.

It took five people to transfer the pulse-less patient, age 37, to a stretcher, where they used the defibrillator to shock his heart three times and bring him back to life. When his wife and three young children arrived an hour later, he was sitting up with a normal heart rate.

‘‘It was a great save,’’ Abbadessa recalled recently at a special hospital program, Schwartz Grand Rounds, that helps medical personnel deal with the emotional stress of hospital care. Even when the results are good, daily emergencies take their toll.

‘‘Calling a code is stressful, no matter what the outcome is,’’ Abbadessa told more than 70 people. ‘‘When the person that arrests on you is young, or probably has a family, that ups your anxiety. You don’t realize the impact it has - until the next emergency. Then you have this weird, panic feeling.’’

Medical staffs once had to handle the aftershocks on their own. Two years ago, South Shore Hospital began offering the Grand Rounds program, funded by the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Topics have included what to do when the doctor says ‘‘stop treatment’’ and the family says ‘‘continue,’’ how to work with an angry family, and coping when a colleague becomes a patient.

This month the program will examine how patients’ religious beliefs can affect medical care.

‘‘You are the first line of support for each other,’’ facilitator Win Hodges of the Schwartz Center said after Griffiths and Abbadessa described the cardiac case. ‘‘When you go home, people there are in a different world.’’

‘‘Have you ever heard someone drop who is suddenly going into cardiac arrest? There’s a certain sound and it’s very scary,’’ said Dr. John Benanti, chairman of emergency services at South Shore Hospital.

Other examples of medical personnel dealing with emotional stress were offered during the program.

A nurse described how staff members sat for hours in the trauma room with the parents of a toddler who had died. The parents couldn’t physically let go of their baby. The father read and reread a favorite children’s story.

‘‘My son was the same age and it was his favorite book,’’ the nurse said. ‘‘To this day, I can’t look at that book.’’

Finally, a family friend arrived and was able to help the parents let go.

Griffiths said that after her father died, she would tear up whenever she had to tell a family a loved one had died.

‘‘I would cry with them. You know exactly what they are going through,’’ she said.

Jenifer Green, nurse manager, described the intense feelings triggered when a 2-year-old drowned in the bathtub while in the care of his father.

‘‘It affected the whole staff,’’ Green recalled. ‘‘There was a lot of anger. How could anybody let this happen to this innocent child? You have to table your own feelings.’’

Others described the shock of finding a friend or neighbor on the emergency stretcher.

‘‘When you work in a community hospital, the likelihood of knowing patients or their children is high,’’ Abbadessa said.

In another case, a friend went into cardiac arrest in an ambulance.

In some cases, it can be helpful to allow a family into the trauma room, to be present for what might become the last moments or last hour of a patient’s life.

‘‘It is very scary the first few times you bring family in during a resuscitation, but it is worth it,’’ a nurse said. ‘‘They can help you get through it as well as your helping them.’’

Yet Paula Beaulieu, director of emergency services, recalled how a family member slapped a nurse on the face, knocking off her eyeglasses, when she told them a loved one had died.

‘‘We have to realize that is part of the grief process - they have just lost someone,’’ she said.

To view the accompanying video, click here.