Healing experience for family caregivers after an intensive care unit death.

Objectives: Family caregivers suffer a high burden of emotional and psychological distress following the death of a loved one in the intensive care unit and often struggle to heal in the weeks following their loss. The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to describe and interpret the experience of healing for family caregivers six weeks following the death of a loved one in the ICU.

Methods: Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of twenty-four family caregivers six weeks following the death of their loved ones in the ICU.