Critical care nurses ’knowledge regarding care of a deceased adult patient

End stage care has important impact in the quality of life of a patient and his relatives. It is a moral duty of a staff nurse to fulfill the varied types of needs of a dying patient and relatives.

The present study Aims to assess the knowledge of staff nurses regarding care of a deceased patient.

A cross sectional survey was undertaken by enrolling 45 critical care staff nurses from different critical care units purposively at a tertiary care hospital. A structured knowledge questionnaire was used in order to assess the needs of staff nurses regarding care of deceased patient. Appropriate descriptive statistics was applied to compute the Results.

Result revealed that staff nurses had good knowledge regarding dealing emotional and supportive needs of relative of deceased one followed by care to be provided after and before visiting the relative of the deceased one. The majority of nurses stated they maintain privacy, clean body discharges after death, arrange transport to shift dead body to postmortem section and document the findings related to dead body and death. Of the respondents, 73.3% did not close the eyes after death, kept folded pillow under head (57.8%), sympathetic attitude by touching and rubbing hand of patient (46.7%) and cut the tube and cover (60%) with dressing.

It is well known fact that a nurse performs different types of work and could be one possible factor to not meeting the needs of dying patient at critical care units. The study recommended to creating climate conducive to the practice of caring skills and justifying time spent with a patient during the final stage of living.