ICU death debriefing for RNs

[R1love]

Good morning everyone.

I am a RN in a 20 bed medical ICU. We have a good amount of deaths, many of the patients dying are patients that have been in our unit for a very long time and the nurses become very close to the patient and the family. We have no true forum for processing these deaths and coming together to talk as staff regarding our emotions and feelings toward our patient deaths. I am working with another co-worker to put together a simple monthly gathering - where we can get together and discuss the deaths in our unit for the previous month. We spoke to friend working in Seattle and she told us they have something called "Death and Doughnuts" where the intensivist brings doughnuts and anyone who would like to participate can, they get together and the physician reads the names of the patients who had passed the month prior. Do any of you have something like this in your hospital or something similar? I would absolutely love to hear your input. Thank you all for your time in reading this post.

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

My clinical area is ICU. I am a HUGE advocate for Critical Incident Stress Debriefing. Smart organizations have integrated this into their normal operating functions. I have worked with hospitals in which CISD was part of the emergency response protocol. You can call it anything you like, but it has been shown to be a very effective technique for stress management and it improves overall nursing satisfaction. There is an increasing amount of evidence that nurses & other health care professionals are vulnerable to cumulative trauma stress disorder - leading to burnout, or worst case... to PTSD.