As a nurse will I be exposed to dead patients a lot?

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello,

I am currently a nursing student and I am confused on if I really want to continue going to school for this. Today in class my professor had some bones from a 12 year old boy and was using them to teach us about the skeletal system. It really got to me and I had to walk out of class. As a nurse will I be exposed to dead patients a lot?

What do you do as part of a bereavement team?

Basically just make sure each unit has the resources it needs to deal with pediatric deaths. Each unit also has a bereavement council (ideally). Unlike in the adult world, when little ones die families may not have had the chance to do a whole lot of "memory making" especially with infants. We keep units supplied with arts and crafts for hand/foot prints and molds, "Beads of courage", blankets & clothes, resources for siblings, we keep in contact with volunteer photography groups who do end of life photography for children and other things like that. More importantly we make sure nurses know what the resources are and what kinds of things to offer families in these situations. Every nurse is going to have that "first" time and we want to make sure there is a few people on every unit at all times prepared to help. Again, unlike in the adult world, families often want to be the ones giving the bath and dressing the child, they want to take photos, even after death, they want to hold their child. We just try to make sure we keep our supplies up and share any new ideas we may hear of.

Specializes in Pedi.

It definitely depends on the speciality. I would not suggest oncology if you are wary of death. When I worked in the hospital, I worked pedi neuro/neurosurgery/neuro-onc. The majority of our deaths were the oncology population though every now and then other patients would die too. A decent portion of the patients went home to die with hospice but some parents didn't want their kids to die at home and chose to remain inpatient. We'd sometimes go months without a comfort care patient and then we'd have 3 or 4 back to back.

Death is a part of life and most definitely a part of nursing. You probably wouldn't see too many dead bodies if you were a school nurse or a nurse in a primary care setting. You'd still have patients who die (my high school had 3 deaths in as many years but no one died at school) but you wouldn't necessarily have to care for the remains.

Our health authority has a "no empty bed" policy. So any compassionate care coming in from the community will be sent to which ever acute care unit that has a private room available. If it's your room you get the patient regardless of your specialty.

Nobody dies in our ICU, they transfer them off to the surgical units if they can.

Sometimes it sucks to be a floor nurse.

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