Helping Families Cope With Sudden or Unexpected Death

This is the text of a Medscape Webcast Video Editorial (you have to register, but it's free)

"Helping Families Cope With Sudden or Unexpected Death"

Physicians often do save lives, and their work as a healer is retold within the narrative of that person's life and by their family. What role then should the physician play when, instead, death comes?

Sudden, unexpected death can deeply wound the lives of those left behind. Families of decedents become a physician's "extended patient" in desperate need of care. The manner in which death is communicated has an indelible effect on the future well-being of families. Research demonstrates significant, often permanent, coping and adjustment difficulties from poorly delivered death notification. This moment is a one-time only opportunity for physicians to treat a wound that's responsive only to kind humanity.

What can you do?

Accept death as the predictable, ultimate outcome of every patient's life story.

Expand the meaning of being a healthcare professional to include working with death.

Learn to heal through caring when a cure is no longer possible.

Comprehend the lasting effect you have on families during death notification.

Realize the potential to reduce litigation by unhappy families through sensitive communication at this troubled time.

Recognize the tangible lifesaving benefits of increasing organ and tissue donation through compassionate death notification of potential donor families.

Identify the death notification opportunity to increase autopsy rates.

Develop standards for death notification procedures in your institutions.

Establish mandatory death notification training within your institution to assure competency and proficiency of all residents and other personnel whose task it is to notify next of kin of a death.

Physicians can be a positive or a negative component of a family's death story. Be the positive.