Lago, Lisa

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.