Nursing students' first experience of death: Identifying mechanisms for practice learning. A realist review.

Objectives: Many studies regarding nursing student's first experience of facing the death of a patient have focused on classroom methods or exploring attitudes towards death and related fears or anxieties. This review is the first to identify the mechanisms that facilitate practice learning as a result of students' first time experience of handling a patient's death.

Design: A realist review as a form of a systematic review of the literature.