This paper aims at investigating how Nursing undergraduates face death. It is a qualitative study; fifteen semi-structured interviews were carried out with nursing undergraduates who attend the third and the fourth years of their course in a college located in northern Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Results show the difficulty Nursing undergraduates experience when dealing with their patients’ death-dying process during their apprenticeship; the difficulty in dealing with anxiety, guilt, and impotence generated by the experience; the attempt to escape from contact with the patients’ relatives by taking on technical and bureaucratic aspects of their work; the apprenticeship professor/supervisor’s lack of support when a patient dies; and a lack of knowledge about the psychological phases of death. I have concluded that Nursing undergraduates are not prepared to experience the death-dying process of their patients-to-be due to the fact that they have few opportunities to discuss the theme during their undergraduate course.
Death; Nursing students; Emotions; Behavioral medicine; Practical nursing