O sofrimento do paciente na UTI : escutando a sua experiência

In tertiary care, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is nowadays one of the most complex settings in providing care to critically ill patients and could make the difference in favor of life. Nevertheless, the stigma of death which pervades the imagination when the ICU is mentioned and the excessive importance placed on machines rather than on the human being end up by causing distress to some extent. As the purpose of this investigation is to understand the distress caused to a patient in an ICU, it has been grounded on the following question: What kind of distress does a patient go through during his/her experience in an ICU? This study has, therefore, an analytical and reflexive character embedded in a qualitative dimension of a phenomenological approach based on narratives. To this purpose, five patients were interviewed from November to December 2008. Out of the empirical material gathered from these narratives we were able to identify several factors that cause distress to ICU patients. Among them were: the certainty that they are critically ill and fear death, a closed room, too much lighting, a typical loneliness arising from being isolated from family members and dear ones, lack of communication with the professional staff, and noise; besides having to undergo therapeutic procedures. In summary, although the ICU is seen as a place of distress, in many aspects and in accord with this research, such distress can and should be relieved. On the other hand, being near to death leads them to a redefinition of life, said the patients.

A morte a concepção de estudantes de enfermagem

Understanding the meaning of death for student nurses is the subject of this research. The motivation for the meeting place of my difficulties as a person and especially as a teacher in the face of nursing students in dealing with death on a day-to-day hospital during the undergraduate course. Death became known that this evil looms before men and destabilizing, causing often irreversible mental disorders when faced with family loss. Therefore, it is appropriate to study it the possibility of making us reflect on our way of living life and dealing with human beings from the perspective of finitude. Aimed to understand the meaning of death for nursing students. For this purpose, it was based on the following guiding question: What is the meaning of death for you as a nursing student? From this perspective, the study was developed within a qualitative dimension of the phenomenological approach. To perform ten students were interviewed during the month of July 2009. Emerged from these interviews a variety of feelings such as fear, anxiety, insecurity, failure, sadness, as the sensory experience of each. To understand the meaning units that emerged from the empirical data which constitute the essence of this research were fundamental studies dealing with Heidegger about the death in a phenomenological perspective, as well as authors Bicudo, D'Assunção, Dastur, Morin, Boff, Kübler-Ross, Boemer, among others. From the understanding of the phenomenon, we can say that death produces mixed feelings in these students that lead to selfprotection, understood, often as a departure from the other, at the approach of death. However, it proved to be sensitive and receptive to the approach of death in other dimensions, beyond the highly technical aspects, pointing to a paradigm shift that has the yeast's own willingness to change. In addition, the research highlights the weaknesses in the education of nurses regarding the understanding of the whole human death and the need to overcome them.