[How to improve the communication and to prevent the conflicts at terminality situations in Intensive Care Unit]

The suffering with the death and the prolonged time of patient's admission in a intensive care unit (ICU) are factors that leads to necessity the best communication with the personal that works in ICU, patients and their family, and its justify this work, whose objective is discuss this subject.

The professional experience of the author was used in this issue and the articles written during the last five years about death, communication and ICU were reviewed by means of MedLine, Up to Date, Google and Brazilian Journal of Intensive Therapy.

It was concluded that the physician, the patient together with her/his family, and the multiprofessional staff of the ICU is one of the main factors that interferes with the process of satisfying both the patient and the ones who work on such unities. For adequate information, the physician must be conscious about therapeutic limits, and must learn how to treat the patient during the process of dying. In this way, the physician will be apt to talk about death. The ideal situation would be that the professional, responsible to give the news, should be experience, from the technical point of view as well as ethical, and should be the same person, as always as possible, when necessary. The patient mostly little be able to influence in her/his process of dying, but if communication is possible, it be simple, honest and humane. The patient's family members have the right of being together with the one who they love, and of being steadily informed about the real situation. All the members in the process must know the truth and the chosen therapeutic orientation to be taken. Communication should be done in a quiet and prived place.