Death

Nurses play a vital role in society by being not just the care-giver of their patients, but also the patient’s advocate when they need advocacy the most. Nurses tend to put the care of patients above their own health. The purpose of this thesis was to see how nurses reflect on the dying process, how they react to it, how they manage their emotions and the emotions of others. My ethnographic study seeks to present nurses’ narratives of experience with death. Ten nurses participated in the study, by partaking in open-ended interviews. The interviews covered the stories the nurses tell about the first encounter they had with the death of a patient, and the most recent encounter the nurses had with a dying patient. The research conducted was in line with the hypothesis. My primary research question centered on exploring how nurses cope or manage their experiences with death, determining how “compassion fatigue” is experienced. Most of the nurses interviewed said that they felt less affected with their most recent experience of patient death. It was as if it had become second nature, stated several of the nurses.

Background: Opioid-related deaths remain a significant public health problem in the United States. Opioids cause approximately 75% of all drug-related deaths. Since 1999, nearly half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses. In 2018, 9,290 people > 55 years old died from opioid overdoses in the United States. In Florida, more than 1,000 older adults died from opioids (as a cause of death) from 2014-2018. However, there is a dearth of research about the manner of deaths of older adults who used, misused, or abused opioids.
Methods: This secondary analysis utilized data from the Florida Drug and Law Enforcement (FDLE) agency between 2014 - 2018. A generalized linear model with a normal probability distribution was used to examine which social determinants or factors such as race, income, education level, percentage of people in poverty, and population density predicted opioid death rate in Florida. Chi-square statistics were used to determine the association between gender, race, and opioid-related deaths (ORD), and the relationship of the manner of death to the opioid drugs involved. The trend of opioid death rate was also analyzed by Florida county and through the data years 2014 to 2018.