Nurses and the Death of Patients

Nurses and the Death of Patients

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Nurses and the Death of Patients

nursing is likable due to its nature of caring for the sick and most people who are never considered essential or instead essential but in desperate need. Care for humanity led me to choose this career; however, as much as it is my passion, some happenings like death still leaves me in emotional disarray. Death is one of the happenings which most people never want to talk about or be prepared to experience(Chen et al., 2006). Therefore having to experience death a lot of times still leaves me worried. Still, I always anchor the emotional distortion upon the belief that life has to end at some point and that I will always try my level best to preserve life and make sure a person lives up to their last breath with hope. This paper discusses death and the role a nurse plays between the end of the dying patient and the patient’s family members.

Most of the time, it is difficult to understand what a patient goes through entirely. Most of the time, the cases that need attention are those cases whereby the person is in bad condition. However, with all these cases, nurses are tasked with assisting the patients through their healing process and, most of the time, psychological needs to fasten their healing (Zheng et al., 2018). At times death is investable, and with all the desire to keep a person alive and keep their candle of hope lighting, the need to prepare them to accept the inevitable seems so tricky. And most of the cases who die suffer throughout sickness for a long time, and a body is in most times already present. Therefore the death of a patient affects not only the family members but also the nurse in a big way, even though not to the same magnitude.

Supporting the family and informing them of their patient’s death is never easy, but using facial recognition and gestures even before uttering words sometimes helps lessen expectations(Edo‐Gual et al.,2014). With the lessened expectations, it is only wiser to announce the death most humbly and positively. Even though this announcement is always followed by a down moment, work always has to continue. Therefore it is my desire in my practice to continue working on everything possible to make sure that the death of one patient does not affect me to the point of not being able to serve others to my level best. This is the place where the life of a nurse is continually tested. Therefore, any nurse needs to realize their roles and stick to them strictly without allowing themselves to be taken away by emotions of daily happenings in the workplace.

In conclusion, nursing is an essential part of the medication of any patient since, without nurses, the medication process could go wrong in so many ways. Therefore even though death makes the nursing experiences not as good as when a patient recovers, it is still part and parcel of nursing, which has to be accepted and deal with through all means possible.

References

Chen, Y. C., Del Ben, K. S., Fortson, B. L., & Lewis, J. (2006). Differential dimensions of death anxiety in nursing students with and without nursing experience. Death Studies, 30(10), 919-929.

Edo‐Gual, M., Tomás‐Sábado, J., Bardallo‐Porras, D., & Monforte‐Royo, C. (2014). The impact of death and dying on nursing students: an explanatory model. Journal of clinical nursing, 23(23-24), 3501-3512.

Zheng, R., Lee, S. F., & Bloomer, M. J. (2018). How nurses cope with patient death: A systematic review and qualitative meta‐synthesis. Journal of clinical nursing, 27(1-2), e39-e49.