Negación de la muerte y su repercusión en los cuidados

Abstract

IntroductionThere are few studies that look in depth at hospital situuations in which professional health workers share their knowledge, meanings and key concepts of the procedures applied when a patient is near death. AimTo identify the social representation of death and the effects that its institutionalization has on physicians and nurses in an acute care hospital. ApproachWe carried out 11 discussion groups and 15 semi-directed interviews with professional health workers of an Intensive Care Unit, an Emergency Room, and various adult Stay Units in an Acute Care Hospital. Main resultsAll health workers think that Intensive Care Units and Emergency Rooms are not the most appropriate places to die, and that Hospital Stay Units lack suitable space for a dignified death. They demand more training in Palliative Care, and they identify different types of death depending on the unit where it occurs, and also to identify the prejudices family members have about death. In these professional health workers’ discourses, the family strongly emerges as an object of care, as well as the importance that information has in the process of dying. ConclusionsNew ways of organizing, talking and thinking about death in the social structure of hospitals could decrease the solitude and suffering that patients, family members and health workers go through when dealing with death.