Death and dying: contributions to a practice based on nursing theoretical frameworks.

OBJECTIVE: To identify nurses' agreement on nursing conceptions with the potential to support their practice in the death and dying process context.

METHOD: An exploratory and descriptive study with a quantitative approach was carried out with 3,451 nurses from 36 hospitals in Portugal, from July 2015 to March 2016. Data collection was carried out with the use of questionnaires and data analysis was carried out by means of descriptive and inferential statistics.

RESULTS: Among conceptions with the potential to support practice, nurses highlighted those from Virginia Henderson, Afaf Meleis, and Madeleine Leininger. The following variables influenced the degree of agreement: region, service, gender, professional training, and length of professional practice.

CONCLUSION: Considering current challenges of a practice that is mostly based on meeting needs, the relevance of nursing practices' purposes emerges in order to facilitate experiencing death and the dying process in culturally significant ways.