As a critical care nurse, Greg Carter saw pained and dying people throughout his career. Now as a clinical assistant professor in the IU School of Nursing, Carter said the idea of people dying alone keeps him up at night.
No One Dies Alone, a program potentially starting in Bloomington this summer or fall, would work to end this worry by providing people with a companion during the last 24 hours of their lives.
“I think, just because someone is leaving this world, we still owe it to them to be compassionate and caring,” said junior Mackenzie Reetz, a nursing student working to start the program in Bloomington.
Reetz initially tried to start NODA after taking a class her sophomore year that addressed death in health care. She had volunteered at a hospital in Indianapolis with the program and wanted to bring it to Bloomington.
NODA started at a hospital in Oregon, and the program now has affiliates across the country.
This year, Reetz renewed her efforts with Carter's help. Reetz is now in the process of putting together training information and setting up contacts with IU Health Bloomington Hospital.
Reetz said she hopes the program will have trials this summer using nursing students before integrating the program into nursing students’ clinical rotations in the fall.
Participants in the program will be called for several-hour shifts with patients roughly 24 hours away from death. Reetz said their duties could include reading to them, playing music or providing comfort in other ways.
“It’s not necessarily these grand actions,” Carter said. “It’s just pulling up a chair and sitting down.”
Reetz and Carter both said they hope the program will expand through time.
After nursing students initially test the program, Reetz said she hopes other volunteers at the hospital will join and eventually the broader community will engage as well.
Carter said he hopes the program can work with patients in their homes or long-term care facilities.
“I think there will be a lot of people in the community who will be touched and want to be involved,” Carter said. “And maybe not health care individuals — they could just be compassionate individuals.”
Reetz said an important component of training will be understanding cultural differences in end-of-life care. She said people of different faiths or backgrounds might want or need different comforts as they die.
Learning to deal with personal feelings toward death will be another part of the training, Reetz said.
“We all have our own experiences with death, but it’s being able to separate that from a professional standpoint,” Reetz said.
Carter said the program might also provide insight into death in Bloomington. He is unaware of any research about how often people in Bloomington die alone and for what reasons.
He thinks modern family structures might lead to more people dying alone, he said. People are having fewer or no children, and children may move away from their families now more than in the past.
“Not all of us have kids or families,” Carter said. “I’m sure it’s going to hit home with people who are going to wonder what it’s going to be like when they reach that point.”
People have ideas about how they want to die, and this program could give people comfort as they approach that time, Carter said.
“We want to be surrounded,” Carter said. “Knowing that there’s a resource out there has to take some of the isolation and loneliness out of that process.”
