Perceptions of nurses to the feelings of who lives the process of dying and death

Abstract

During training, nurses often do not feel prepared to deal with patients and family members as they go through the process of dying and death. Instead, they learn through professional experience and consequently fail to recognize many feelings, while the rendered care often falls short of the needs of the patient and relatives alike. As such, we set as our objective to find out the nurses' perception concerning the manifestations and feelings expressed by patients and family that go through this process. We accomplished a qualitative research by conducting semi-structured interviews with active nurses in the intensive care units of two hospitals in the southernmost part of the country. Through textual analysis, we built two categories: patients and family under the nurses' observation; and difficulties and strategies of the nurses in relation to the process of dying and death. The nurses notice, among patients, feelings of loneliness, fear, of death as a relief, pain, anger and rage, among others; and among relatives, anguish, impotence and fear. According to the nurses, the preparation to act in these situations comes from repeated experiences, reinforcing the need for greater training so that future nurses do not enter the professional field so unprepared to face such situations.