Death, Mourning and their Effect on Health Teams

Abstract

This study deals with death and mourning, two permanent and inevitable companions to life and to health team members, who are routinely immersed both in their own personal conflicts and those of other people.

Objective: to understand the feelings of medical and nursing staff in the presence of death and the dying process.

Methodology: qualitative study, using a phenomenological, hermeneutic and epistemic matrix, and following Spiegelberg’s five stages: description, search for perspectives, search for essence, constitution of meaning and interpretation.

Conclusions: employing depth interviews, two categories were detected in the constitution of meaning of experiences on the way to the central emergent category in the world of the participating persons. The subjects of the study were doctors and nurses. The central emergent category was fear.