Abstract: Objective: To explore and discuss the effects of narrative intervention on relieving the anticipatory grief of spouses of patients with advanced gastric cancer. Methods: A total of 64 patients with advanced gastric cancer receiving chemotherapy from February 2019 to January 2020 in the three wards of the Oncology Department of a tertiary Grade A hospital in Zhengzhou and their spouses were recruited and divided into the experiment group and the control group according to the time of their admission with 32 cases in each group. Research objects in the experiment group were given narrative intervention by spouses while the other group received normal psychological guidance. Besides, all the spouses were assessed separately before intervention, 12 weeks after intervention using Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) and Anticipatory Grief Scale (AGS) for analysis and comparison. The compliance of the experiment group was also assessed. Results: The AGS score of the experiment group after 12 weeks of intervention was (69.70±6.31), which was significantly lower than that of that of the control group (93.28±9.38) with statistically significant differences (P<0.05); the CD-RISC score of the experiment group was (76.97±7.00), which was higher than that of the control group (58.34±9.87) and the differences were statistically significant (P<0.05); 53.3% of the spouses in the experiment group showed high compliance in written narrative. Conclusion: Narrative intervention by spouses can effectively relieve the anticipatory grief of patients with advanced gastric cancer and improve the mental resilience of their spouses.

Key words: advanced gastric cancer; spouses; narrative intervention; anticipatory grief; oncology nursing