Emotions Related to Death among Nurses Working in the Intensive Care Unit

Abstract

Introduction. Nurses working in intensive care units often encounter the death of their patients, which affects their emotional state, and then not only their work but also their personal lives.

Aim. The aim of the study is to present the most common emotions towards death in nurses caring for life-threatening patients.

Material and Methods. The cross-sectional study was conducted on a group of 108 nurses working in the intensive care unit of the University Hospital in Krakow. Respondents completed a proprietary questionnaire based on the standard tool, the Scale of Feelings, in which they marked the intensity of individual emotions experienced in connection with death. The data was developed based on the instructions of the authors of the tool and, using the capabilities of the Statistica 12 package, the existing dependencies were presented.

Results. The most common emotion related to death, in terms of basic emotions that accompanied the respondents, was fear (x̅=4.45) and sadness (x̅=4.08). In the subcategories of basic emotions, the most frequently declared feelings were: sadness (x̅=5.69), grief (x̅=5.43) and anxiety (x̅=4.71). There was no correlation between the emotions and the respondents’ age or their declared professional experience (p>0.05). Only the level of anger was significantly more frequent in the group of respondents who rarely experienced death at work, i.e. less than 10 deaths (p=0.03).

Conclusions. The difficult experience of death for nurses working in the intensive care unit most often triggered fear and sadness in them. It is therefore necessary to conduct further research to determine the exact attitudes towards death among medical personnel who come into contact with death in order to reduce their negative impact on the work and personal lives of carers of dying people. (JNNN 2023;12(1):17–23)