Factors affecting the emotional reactions of patient relatives who receive news of death: a prospective observational study

Abstract Background Reporting the death of relatives to a family member is a very stressful task for physicians. Grief reactions differ from person to person. Methods Demographic data of 100 patients who died after staying in ICU for more than three days were recorded. For each patient, one of the family members filled a form which contained their own age, gender, education level, marital status, number of children, degree of relationship, psychiatric treatment status, living in the same house as the patient, and whether they had ever visited the ICU before. Grief reactions were evaluated in five different categories: normal grief response, initial shock reaction, denial, feeling guilty and anger. Results When the death was reported, 55.0% of the relatives accepted this situation as normal, 19.0% felt guilty and 14.0% showed an initial shock reaction. The results showed that for a one-unit increase in the patient's age, the probability of the denial reaction among relatives was reduced by 746 times and the probability of feeling guilty was reduced by 698 times. Conclusion The rate of denial and guilt in the grief reactions among patient relatives when given news of death in the intensive care unit increases with the decrease in patient age.