Nursing Interventions in Primary Care for the Management of Maladaptive Grief: A Scoping Review

Grief is a natural and self-limited adaptation process to a new reality that emerges after a significant loss (whether real or perceived), with a broad variety of manifestations that exert an impact on a grieving person’s health. The study aim was to synthesize the evidence available about the interventions carried out by Primary Health Care nurses, by means of an individual approach to reduce maladaptive grief or maladaptive grief risk. A scoping review was conducted (November and December 2023) through searches in Medline, Cinahl, Web of Science, ProQuest and Scopus using MeSH terms combined with Booleans. Primary research of any design in adult people undergoing grief situations and receiving professional assistance by nurses in the primary, home and community care contexts published after 2009 in English, Spanish or Portuguese languages were included. Excluded publications were those conducted in in-hospital clinical settings and which did not correspond to research designs or the gray literature. The screening process was carried out by two reviewers using the appropriate JBI critical appraisal tools for each design and discrepancies were resolved by a third reviewer. A total of n = 10 studies were included (n = 4 qualitative, n = 2 RCTs, n = 1 quasi-experimental, n = 2 cross-sectional observational, and n = 2 mixed methods). The qualitative studies identified topics and subtopics of professionals’ and families’ experiences of grief. The observational studies analyzed symptoms and factors associated with the grieving process. Interventions consisted of cognitive–behavioral therapies delivered by psychological specialists who assessed the severity of grief in a range of cultural contexts using different instruments. The evidence retrieved from the studies that address the reduction in maladaptive grief or maladaptive grief risk is not conclusive. There is a need to increase both the number and the methodological quality of studies assessing the effectiveness of Nursing care in Primary Health Care for individuals experiencing maladaptive grief or maladaptive grief risk. Further research should focus on experimental studies, developing specific interventions conducted by nurses to address individual’s grief and prevent maladaptive grief.