References
Death notification delivery and training methods
Abstract
For a paramedic, delivering a death notification (DN) is one of the most difficult and stressful messages they will have to communicate in practice. Stress and anxiety in both recipients and paramedics have been documented through a limited literature base. The current review seeks to understand the existing educational tools and training around DN, and evaluates the applicability of these in the pre-hospital environment.
Death notification (DN) is a skill that is required by most pre-hospital clinicians when dealing with failed resuscitation attempts (Vail et al, 2011). It is not intuitively learned, nor is it made effective without training (Dosanjh et al, 2001; Amiel et al, 2006; Douglas, 2013). If poorly delivered, it can become a lasting negative memory for the person receiving the news and it is shown to negatively affect the health outcomes of relatives (Baile et al, 2000). Consequently, this can increase the strain on the wider health service. It has been evidenced that paramedics use colleagues as a source of informal support to mitigate the stress of giving a DN (Douglas et al, 2012). The aim of the current literature review is to examine and critique the existing methods and training of DN within all areas of medicine—as well as to understand how these can be applied to pre-hospital care and aid clinicians to use existing tools for this difficult task.
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