How does caring for dying patients shape nurses' thoughts about their own lives and deaths?

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Registered nurses caring for patients at the end of life often face issues of suffering, dying, and death, whether in hospital or community care. These situations can raise serious existential questions that challenge nurses' identities as human beings. This study aimed to describe and gain a deeper understanding of nurses' existential questions when caring for dying patients.

The researchers used focus-group interviews with registered nurses who shared similar experiences and backgrounds in end-of-life care to explore this sensitive subject in depth. The interviews took place in hospice care, community care, and a palliative care unit in western Sweden. A qualitative hermeneutic approach was used to interpret the data.

Nurses' existential questions involved balancing responsibility and guilt in relation to their patients; fear and courage in their roles as professional caregivers and fellow human beings; and hope and despair concerning others' deaths and their own.

The authors describe nurses in end-of-life care as encountering various emotions from patients related to physical, spatial, and temporal matters. When nurses encounter these emotions as expressions of a patient's suffering, they face the challenge of balancing different feelings toward patients, both as professional caregivers and as fellow human beings. Caring for patients at the end of life can offer nurses growth both professionally and as human beings.