Support of family members within the nursing intervention Dying Care

The intervention Dying Care from the Nursing Intervention Classification (NIC) includes six activities to support family members. The aim of the study was to find out if nurses perform these activities, and whether they consider their introduction into contemporary nursing practice in the Czech Republic to be feasible. We used a quantitative approach in which we carried out a cross-sectional study, which incorporated a non-standardised structured questionnaire with two Likert scales. The 468 participants in the study were nurses from hospices, oncology departments, geriatric departments, long-term care facilities, homes for the elderly and home care agencies.The results showed that the nurses most often employ the activity Support the family's efforts to remain at the bedside (scale average 1.72) and Facilitate obtaining spiritual support for patient and family (scale average 2.06). The nurses also consider the introduction of these two activities into contemporary nursing practice to be feasible. One fifth of the nurses stated they always use the activity Include the family in care decisions and activities, as desired (scale average 2.38) and Encourage patient and family to share feelings about death (scale average 2.51). All the above mentioned activities were most frequently used by nurses in hospices.The results suggest that the importance of these activities is recognised by nurses across settings. However, they see the actual feasibility differently. This confirms the need to include family support in care for the dying even in the settings which primarily do not provide specialised palliative care.