Nurses’ experience of death in intensive care

Death and dying is a unique event, impersonal and irremediably associated with the life cycle. The way we understand it has changed over time, particularly in societies where technological advances prevail. Death has been stripped of customs and the home, to the detriment of the cold, impersonal hospital. Intensive care units provide care for potentially life-threatening patients. They are equipped with an advanced set of surveillance, monitoring and therapeutic resources that are essential for the patient’s haemodynamic sustainability. Nursing is a discipline of knowledge that bases its process on 'caring for others' throughout their life cycle. Intensive care nurses must have a set of competences that allow them to master the technology at their disposal in order to act in a timely manner. Death occurs with some frequency in intensive care and, in this sense, the nurse who masters technology is the same one who must relegate the curative plan to the use of palliative actions, where the humanisation of care and communication with the family are the main working tools.