  Conducting Successful Staff Support Sessions
Caring for cancer patients can often be a confronting experience for nurses and other health care professionals. To ensure that the health care staff have sufficient support, this fast fact sheet provides a number of guidelines in establishing staff support sessions. This fast fact sheet would be useful to a broad range of clinical staff - as a tip-sheet for the Nurse Unit Manager organising the support session, as a hand-out for the nurses attending the session, or anyone else wanting some guidance as to conduct in group support sessions more generally.
Included in the fast fact sheet:
- Setting goals - what types of goals and why;
- Developing a group agreement - why it's necessary, what sorts of boundaries must be established in the group discussion, etc;
- Getting the most out of the experience - how to encourage staff members to discuss their experiences, how to foster inclusiveness within the group discussion, etc.
This fact sheet is sourced from Ausmed Publications' textbook: 'Psychosocial Care of Cancer Patients: A health professional's guide to what to say and do', editors Dr Jemma Gilchrist & Dr Katharine Hodgkinson, (2008) chapter three: 'Thriving as a Health Professional', author Dr Jemma Gilchrist.
Author: Dr Jemma Gilchrist
Jemma Gilchrist is a senior clinical psychologist with clinical experience in psycho-oncology. Since 1999 she has worked in two separate tertiary oncology services providing psychosocial care to adults with a wide range of cancer diagnoses as well as their families and carers. Jemma has experience in educating other health professionals on the role of psychosocial support and interventions in the oncology setting. In addition she is an honorary associate of the University of Sydney and provides clinical supervision to clinical psychology interns at master's level. She completed her doctorate in 1995 in the area of children's eyewitness memory, and has published in the areas of interviewing children about stressful events, the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome and postnatal depression. She has longstanding interest in the impact and treatment of anxiety in the medically unwell.
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