ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an awareness of the ways in which professionals who care for seriously ill children may bring their own vulnerabilities, assumptions, and emotions into their work and the ways in which these responses undoubtedly impact the clinical situation. As professionals working in palliative and end-of-life care, we value our training, our experience, and our ongoing professional development. Most health-care professionals would like to believe that their emotions and beliefs never impact the care they deliver. The chapter examines the ways in which emotional responses might impact the provision of care. In fact, if pressed, many would be reluctant to even look at their feeling responses, let alone acknowledge that they can affect provision of care; this would not be "professional". Nurses, medical social workers, physical therapists, and others had to "prove" their value to the physicians with whom they worked. Stoicism, intellectual understanding, clinical excellence, and a "buck up" attitude were, perhaps, ways to prove one's value.