The health care in geriatric or intensive care unit: The clinic of predictive death

Objectives. - This article aims at differentiating the case practices through which medical teams are confronted with death in a geriatric context and in an intensive care context. We study the subjective experience of health care professionals in intensive care unit and geriatric unit in front of patients with risk of death. Materials and methods. - Discourse from a test produced during some analysis sessions with a geriatric care team about their care practices and clinical interviews with a medical team working in an intensive care unit and carrying out university research. They had to develop their personal feeling about the organization of their work and their management of the relationship with the old patients or hospitalized patients. All interviews were entirely recorded and rewritten. Then, we proceeded to the coding of the interviews and we realized a thematic analysis with the consensus of three searchers. Results. - Beyond individual defensive mechanisms installed by them in order to manage the issue of death at the very best, it is the team, through their cohesion, through their working practices, through their collective strategies, who can play an important supporting role for its members in an intensive care. unit or on the contrary generate suffering in geriatrics. Thus, we will show the way these differentiated contexts adjust the medical team's way of thinking and acting when they want to manage death and its conditions. (C) 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.