What Intern Nursing Students in Turkey Think About Death and End-of-Life Care? A Qualitative Exploration

First death experiences of newly graduated nurses: A qualitative phenomenological study

Newly graduated nurses typically face death for the first time during the transition to their professional careers. This encounter can cause nurses to experience compelling emotions and make it difficult for them to manage and cope with the process of adaptation to the profession and the death process of the patient. This study aims to retrospectively examine and reveal the first death experiences of newly graduated nurses (N = 15) using a retrospective phenomenological method. Analysis of the responses of the newly graduated nurses revealed three themes: first encounter with death, nothing is like before, and support need. Newly graduated nurses realized that their first death experiences change their perspectives on life and profession and that nursing touches human life.

Nursing Students' Spiritual/Religious Coping Strategies Dealing With First Experience of Witnessing Death During Clinical Practices

This study aims at determining spiritual/religious coping strategies of nursing students dealing with the first experience of witnessing death during clinical practices. One of the qualitative research approaches, a descriptive phenomenological study was designed. The study was carried out with 14 nursing students studying at a state university in Turkey. The students' first experiences of witnessing death were examined by the personal in-depth interviewing method. Data were analyzed using the thematic analysis method. The following five main themes were identified by the analysis: Perception of death; Witnessing death for the first time; Coping with death experience; Needs and recommendations; Impact of spirituality and religion. The obtained findings were presented according to the COREQ criteria. The findings showed that witnessing death for the first time is a difficult experience that affects students in various ways and students prayed and performed their prayers frequently to cope with the death experience.

Nursing Students’ Experiences With Patient Death and Palliative and End-of-life Care: A Systematic Review and Meta-synthesis

AIM

To synthesise the experiences of nursing students encountering patient death and caring for patients under palliative care or at end-of-life and their families in clinical settings BACKGROUND: Nurses are pivotal in caring for dying patients and families. It has been reported that nursing students feel unprepared in caring for dying patients and handling patient death. Understanding their experiences would better inform how palliative care education can be improved and how students can be better supported in clinical settings.

DESIGN

A qualitative systematic review and meta-synthesis METHODS: PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, ProQuest and Google Scholar were searched for peer-reviewed articles and theses/dissertations published between 1 January 2012-25 Feb 2023. Qualitative studies of any design reporting nursing students' experiences of patient death, caring for patients under palliative care, at end-of-life, or with time-limiting diseases in clinical settings in English were included. Study quality was evaluated using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme tool. Data were synthesised using Sandelowski and Barroso's 2-step framework through a meta-summary using thematic analysis, which were then integrated into meta-syntheses using an event timeline.

RESULTS

The review included 71 studies from 26 countries (n = 1586 nursing students). The meta-summary contained 8 themes and 23 subthemes: (1) Communication experience with patients and families, (2) Satisfaction with care provided to patients and families, (3) Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on death and dying, (4) Perceptions of death and dying, (5) Impact of death, (6) Nursing education on palliative end-of-life care, (7) Support systems and coping methods, (8) Learning outcomes. The meta-synthesis depicted nursing students' experiences before, during and after encountering dying patients, families and patient death. Suggestions for nursing faculty and clinical staff on how they could equip students with necessary skills and knowledge and support them in clinical settings were also provided.

CONCLUSIONS

While caring for dying patients and families was beneficial to nursing students' learning and professional development, they encountered many challenges. Governments, clinical and academic nursing leaders must prioritise the integration of palliative care content into the curricula across nursing schools in face of increasing palliative and end-of-life care needs in patients. Nursing schools should ensure that students are adequately prepared by designing culturally and socioeconomically relevant curricula, integrating theoretical and experiential learning and offering students a thorough understanding of palliative and end-of-life care. Clinical staff and nursing instructors should support students emotionally and guide them in patient care.

Intern nursing students’ perceived barriers to providing end-of-life care for dying cancer patients in a death taboo cultural context: A qualitative study

Objective

Internationally, intern nursing students' experiences with dying patients and death are an area of great concern. However, barriers to providing end-of-life care for dying cancer patients have not been extensively investigated in mainland China, where death remains a taboo issue. Therefore, this study aimed to elucidate intern nursing students' perceived barriers to their performance in providing end-of-life cancer care in the Chinese cultural context.

Methods

This was a descriptive, qualitative study. Twenty-one intern nursing students from three cancer centers in mainland China were interviewed between January 2021 and June 2022. A thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data. The theory of planned behavior was adopted to design the study and identify themes.

Results

A range of barriers related to attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control that hindered intern nursing students from acquiring abilities to deal with patient dying and death were identified in the Chinese cultural context.

Conclusions

Chinese intern nursing students encountered many barriers that affected their provision of end-of-life care to dying cancer patients. Strategies to improve their ability to provide appropriate end-of-life care should focus on helping them develop appropriate attitudes toward dying and death and how to overcome subjective norms and behavioral control barriers.

Student Nurses' Perception of Good Death and Religious Coping Styles

This research aims to examine the perception of the good death and religious coping styles of student nurses. The research is a correlational descriptive study. The research was conducted with 358 nursing students at a state university in the east of Turkey. It was found in the study that students had a good perception of death (58.83 ± 6.12) and mostly used positive religious coping styles (positive/24.55 ± 3.71, negative/13.31 ± 4.21). As a result of the correlation analysis, a weakly significant positive relationship was determined between good death perception and positive religious coping (p < .001).This study observed that students' perceptions of good death increased along with their positive religious coping styles.