Uma fenomenologia da escuta dos profissionais de saúde sobre a morte e o morrer no contexto da UTI

Abstract

Death is an inevitable event inherent to life. Throughout history, its perception and experience have varied; however, nowadays, with medical and technological advancements, death occurs mainly in hospitals, especially in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). For the healthcare team, dealing with patients' end of-life processes is a daily reality. This study aimed to analyze how healthcare professionals experience the death and dying of patients within the ICU context, specifically seeking to identify the modes and structures through which death is approached in Western society and to describe the meaning of the life-world from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. To achieve this, the ICU context and the sociodemographic profile of the participating professionals were characterized, describing their life-world. The study sought to understand the meaning attributed to death and dying by the ICU's multidisciplinary team professionals. It is a qualitative, empirical, non-experimental study, grounded in Husserlian phenomenological orientation. The method was based on phenomenological reduction. The research was conducted in the General ICU of the University Hospital of Maranhão at the Federal University of Maranhão, Presidente Dutra Unit. Eleven (11) healthcare professionals from the multidisciplinary team participated, and semi-structured interviews were conducted using the technique of suspended listening. The collected data were analyzed through Husserl's phenomenological method. An intentional analysis of the participants’ lived experiences was carried out, revealing the following essences: being a healthcare professional means caring; talking about death: a deep and difficult process; the dimension of religiosity and spirituality in death; naturalized death; felt death; and death as the minimization of suffering. All these essences described the emerging phenomena that traversed the participants’ life-world. Thus, it was observed that, regardless of professional category and the variation in the content of the participants’ reports, the meaning of death and dying converged toward a common core related to the life-world.