The Relationship to Death as a Source of Stress for Nurses on a Coronary Care Unit

Abstract

This paper attempts to understand one of the ways in which nurses on a coronary care unit may be subjected to stress around the problem of establishing a meaningful relationship to death. The themes that nurses expressed during the course of a support group which they had requested are analyzed and discussed. The paper focuses on the stress felt by the nurses over responsibility for controlling illness and death which indicated an unconscious confusion between the feeling of being responsible for the care of an ill or dying patient and the feeling of being responsible for the occurrence of the patient's illness or death. The possible source of this stressful confusion in medicine's and society's own relationship to death is discussed.