Emocje jako element postawy towarzyszący pielęgniarce w kontakcie z pacjentem umierającym

Abstrakt

Introduction. Death, as the final stage of one’s life, causes many emotional states since it is related to the process of dying. Nurses experience various types of emotions in their professional work when accompanying a dying patient. Usually, these are negative emotions e.g. sorrow, sadness, gloom, feeling guilty, despair, bitterness etc. Nurse’s private and professional life may be disturbed if these emotions become too intense or the process of identification with the patient goes too far.

Objective. The objective of the study was to recognise attitudes related to emotions experienced by nurses witnessing patient’s death.

Material and methodology. The study group comprised of 31 nurses employed in different types of medical units. All nurses graduated from medical high-schools. The majority ( 58%) of nurses (n=18) were over 35 years old. As far as the years in nurse profession were concerned, nurses working for 16 years and more comprised the most numerous subgroup (42%, n=13). All respondents witnessed death, 42% - very often (n-13), 10% - often (n=3), and 48% - rarely (n=15). The methodology of this work was based on qualitative study using survey questionnaire (analysis based on Rubach’s methodology). The technique of non-categorized interview was applied where respondents presented their view regarding death in writing. The analysis of qualitative data was performed in two stages. The first one was aimed at reducing information while the second one resulted with data presentation.

Results. Thirty one analytic categories were derived from 31 interviews and than they were coded in selective and theoretical manner. Then they went so called data representation, which led to create selective categories with similar meaning and classify them to one of three groups. These three groups were then transformed into three relation nets from which 3 theoretical features relating to three types of emotional attitude were derived. These emotional attitudes described what nurses felt when facing death and they included.

Conclusions. In the study group, three types of attitudes toward death relating to emotions experienced by nurses witnessing death were defined: emotional, outdistancing and neutral types.