Coping with Death: Perceptions of Health Care Professionals Working in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and in a Geriatric Service

Many health care professionals have to deal regularly with their patients' deaths and relatives' bereavement, but frequently they have not been trained in this area, and therefore the psychological cost is very high. The authors' principal aim in this work is to describe health care professionals' perceptions about death. A group of health care professionals who worked with children was compared with a group who worked with elderly people. Results showed that emotional aspects were perceived as more important than biomedical aspects in the death process. Between the groups, some differences were detected relating to the perception of the proximity of members' own deaths, and the authors could also observe that the death of a loved one was perceived as more important than their own death. These results should be taken into account to design training programs for health care professionals to minimize psychological costs and increase the quality of care.