The experience of pre-hospital emergency personnel in breaking death news: a phenomenological study

BACKGROUND: Today, breaking the death of patients to their families has become one of the challenges for medical staff. Considering the lack of study in the pre-hospital emergency, the present study aimed to explore the experience of pre-hospital emergency personnel regarding the breaking death news to families. METHOD: In this qualitative study with a descriptive phenomenological method, data were collected by purposeful sampling method through in-depth interviews with thirteen pre-hospital emergency personnel in Kermanshah and Kurdistan provinces. After recording and writing the interviews, the data were managed by MAQUDA-10 software and analyzed using the Collaizi approach. RESULTS: Of 13 participants, five from Kermanshah, eight from Kurdistan, and 12 (92%) were married. The mean age and work experience were 34.38 and 10.38 years, respectively. Five main extracted themes were 1) perceived stress, 2) challenge factors of breaking death news, 3) unnecessary actions, 4) death breaking precautions, and 5) BDN requirements. They were covered fifteen sub-themes. CONCLUSION: In this study, emergency medical employees were always faced with stress and challenges to announce the patient's death to families, including the stress of violence against employees. Hereof, personnel had to take unnecessary care actions such as slow resuscitation to transfer the patient to the hospital. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12912-022-00899-x.