Abstract

Postmortem care is basic nursing skill, includes physical care of the body, patient's cultural background, family support, issuing death certificates based on government regulations, and communicating with funeral directors. However, the hospice team has been the only treatment group that takes postmortem care seriously. The goal of this research is to develop a guideline and a teaching video of postmortem care for nursing staff. The subjects are nurses after probation. First, we interviewed them about their perception of postmortem care. Second, we set up a guideline and a video on the topic of postmortem care. The participants took pre-test and post test for evaluation. The data were analyzed with SPSS 12.0. We included 69 nurses whose average work experience was 6.1 years. 73% of them hadn't taken courses about postmortem care at school. 25% believed that knowledge learning at school was unpractical. There are significant differences before and after the class in the intention of doing postmortem care (p=0.015), the importance of postmortem care (p=0.001), and the perception of postmortem care (p=0.001). The predictors that influence perception of postmortem care are: number of experiences in practicing postmortem care, work unit, and importance of postmortem care. Terminally ill patients usually end lives in the hospital. Postmortem care is basic nursing skill. We suggest that postmortem care should include in the training program for new staff in order to improve the quality of terminal care. The results also provide information to improve terminal care for administrator of nurse.