Dealing with Death: Medical Students' Experiences with Patient Loss

Abstract

This article explores medical students' experiences and coping strategies when confronting patient loss in their 3rd and 4th years of their programs. Much of the literature on the impact of patient losses focuses on physicians. This article joins a handful of works aimed at how medical students experience and cope with patient loss. In-depth interviews with 20 medical students provided rich descriptions of their varying experiences coping with death. Consistent with previous work, students experience substantial emotional stress coping with patient deaths, though some were more difficult to bear than others, such as when the dying patient was a child or when treatment errors could have contributed to deaths. Common coping mechanisms included talking through their emotions, thrusting themselves into continuing their rounds, crying, participating in infant death rituals, and turning to religion. When deaths occurred, senior personnel who exhibited empathy toward the deceased and tolerance toward the students' emotional responses were lauded and made the process easier. Also emotionally daunting, in many instances, was dealing with the families of dying patients. Most of the students did not view death as a failure, contrary to much earlier literature, except in instances in which human error or decision making may have played a part in causing the death of a patient.