Role of intensive care nurses on guiding patients’ families/relatives to organ donation

OBJECTIVE: The aim was to determine the role of intensive care nurses on guiding the families/relatives of brain-death patients to organ donation. METHODS: This research is a descriptive study. While the population of the study consisted of 1710 nurses working in the intensive care units of public, private and university hospitals in the city of Istanbul, the sample consisted of 353 intensive care nurses selected with stratified random sampling method from the probability sampling methods from this population. The data were collected by using “Data Collection Form”. RESULTS: It was determined that 74.5% of the intensive care nurses carefully listened the family/relatives of the patient with possible brain death or suffering from brain death and supported them to express their emotion and thoughts clearly; when the family/relatives of the patients hospitalised in the intensive care unit wanted to get information about organ donation, 20.7% of the nurses made the preliminary explanation themselves and then guided the patient to an organ transplant coordinator for detailed information and 3.1% of the nurses generally gave this information themselves. CONCLUSIONS: It was determined that the knowledge of the intensive care nurses about brain death and organ donation was partially adequate and the function of guiding the families/relatives of brain-death patients to organ donation was mostly done by the physician.