Caring for Dying Patients: Understanding Critical Care Nurses' Experiences

Nurses are the caretakers who have the most contact with patients and families above any other member of the health care team. Nurses provide care to dying patients as part of professional and occupational responsibilities. Caring for the dying can create a stressful environment. It is important to understand how nurses psychologically adapt while providing care and support.

The purpose of this descriptive qualitative research study was to explore, describe, and understand the experiences of nurses caring for dying patients in critical care.

A qualitative descriptive study was conducted employing semistructured face-to-face interviews utilizing naturalistic inquiry and a content analysis approach linking generalizations to theory. A purposeful sampling of 9 critical care nurses, interviewed between July 2024 and October 2024, were selected and participated in this study.

Eight themes were illuminated from the content analysis: empathy, feelings of ambivalence, inevitability, inspiration, relationship, responsibility, self-preservation, and sorrow, all in the context of 3 subthemes: the patient, family, and health care team. The themes uncovered mediating behaviors by the nurse to overcome reactions and responses to critical care patient deaths.

The 8 themes, and subthemes, described the way in which critical care nurses create the ability to psychologically adapt to the dying patient. The central meaning of these findings concludes that nurses function as an adaptive system when faced with the stimuli of a dying patient. It is important that nurses who care for dying patients are informed by this research so they can enhance their functioning within the profession.