• J Rashotte, F Fothergill-Bourbonnais, and M Chamberlain.
• Children's Hospital, Eastern Ontario, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, Ottawa.
• Heart Lung. 1997 Sep 1;26(5):372-86.

ObjectiveTo describe the grief experience of pediatric intensive care nurses when their patients die.DesignHeideggerian phenomenological approach; nonprobability, purposive sampling; semistructured interviews; data analyzed using Colaizzi's method of phenomenology.SettingPediatric intensive care unit within a Canadian pediatric metropolitan university teaching hospital.ParticipantsSix registered nurses, currently working in the pediatric intensive care unit, who had experienced the death of at least three children for whom they had cared. Nursing experience ranged from 2 to 20 years, intensive care nursing experience from 9 months to 19 years, and tenure on the unit from 9 months to 15 years.ResultsData were analyzed for recurring themes according to the procedure outlined by Colaizzi. These nurses acknowledged they suffered multiple exposures to children's death and experienced grief. The interviews revealed eight themes that included one about their grief responses--hurting; two that described the influencing contextual factors--nurse-family unit relationship and dissonance; and five that related to coping strategies used to manage their feeling of grief--self-expression, self-nurturance, termination of relationship activities, engaging in control-taking activities, and self-reflection. Further analysis revealed that managing grief effectively was an experiential learning process for the participants.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate that pediatric intensive care nurses' grief is different from that of surviving family member grief. Further research is required to document in further depth the experiential learning process to coping with multiple, accumulated losses for these professional caregivers. The findings of this study also could encourage further research that examines interventions designed to enhance the type of education and support needed in relation to the grief experience of nurses.

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