The experience of pre-hospital emergency personnel in breaking death news: a phenomenological study

Abstract

Background Today, breaking the death of patients to their families has become one of the challenges for medical staff. Considering the lack of study in the pre-hospital emergency, the present study aimed to explore the experience of pre-hospital emergency personnel regarding the breaking death news to families. Method In this qualitative study with a descriptive phenomenological method, data were collected by purposeful sampling method through in-depth interviews with thirteen pre-hospital emergency personnel in Kermanshah and Kurdistan provinces. After recording and writing the interviews, the data were managed by MAQUDA-10 software and analyzed using the Collaizi approach. Results Of 13 participants, five from Kermanshah, eight from Kurdistan, and 12 (92%) were married. The mean age and work experience were 34.38 and 10.38 years, respectively. Five main extracted themes were 1) perceived stress, 2) challenge factors of breaking death news, 3) unnecessary actions, 4) death breaking precautions, and 5) BDN requirements. They were covered fifteen sub-themes. Conclusion In this study, emergency medical employees were always faced with stress and challenges to announce the patient's death to families, including the stress of violence against employees. Hereof, personnel had to take unnecessary care actions such as slow resuscitation to transfer the patient to the hospital.

Perspectives of Palestinian Healthcare Workers on Factors Affecting the Families’ Acceptance of News of Death: A Cross-Sectional Study

“…The analysis showed that participants who have reported a higher number of deaths are more likely to achieve family acceptance of death than those who have reported fewer deaths. These findings contradict with those who argue that participants who have dealt with a few deaths are superior at telling family members about death [ 7 , 8 , 29 ]. Participants who have not felt that reporting death is still as heavy and difficult as the first time are about four times more likely to gain family acceptance than those who lacked the confidence and experience.…”

A Study on the Ethical Aspects of Witnessed Resuscitation from the Perspective of Prehospital Emergency Caregivers

“…In addition, the personal characteristics of health care staff, the setting in which the death occurred, the manner of death, futile medical practices, and the decision to transfer are important factors that may cause problems in reporting the death. 25 60.6% of the participants in our study stated that witnessed resuscitation would not facilitate the death notification to the patient's relatives, and 71% stated that it would not reduce the reaction given to the health care personnel who transmitted the death notification.…”