Clinical Instructors’ Interactions with Nursing Students throughout the Process of a Patient’s Death

Abstract

〔Aim〕To elucidate how clinical instructors interact with nursing students throughout the process of the death of a patient who was under their care during practical training.

〔Methods〕Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five clinical instructors. Obtained data were reorganized to reconstruct the interaction along a timeline for each clinical instructor. Then, codes were extracted and categorized. Furthermore, similar interactions were extracted from the overall data, and their characteristics were qualitatively analyzed.

〔Results〕During the deterioration of the patient’s condition and the patient’s death, clinical instructors were “supporting a nursing student to cope with the imminent death of a patient,” and, “allowing nursing students to gain first-hand experience of the care and support provided by nurses to patients and their families as the patients reach their end of life.”After the patient’s death, clinical instructors were “supporting nursing students so that the experience of a patient’s death does not become a negative one.”

〔Conclusions〕Clinical instructors’ roles were revealed to involve caring for students while teaching care for patients until the end of their lives. At times, however, clinical instructors were confused by the nursing students’ reactions to death. Our results suggest the importance of cooperation between the clinical instructor and nursing educator in capturing the subtleties of nursing students’ emotions.