ATTITUDES IN FRONT OF DEATH: NURSES’ VIEWS IN THE HOSPITAL ENVIRONMENT

Maria Filomena Passos Texeira Cardoso,Maria Manuela Ferreira Pereira Da Silva Martins Martins,Letícia De Lima Trindade

doi:10.1590/1980-265x-tce-2019-0204

Maria Filomena Passos Texeira Cardoso, Maria Manuela Ferreira Pereira Da Silva Martins Martins + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/1980-265x-tce-2019-0204

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Abstract

ABSTRACT Objective: to analyze the relationship between personal characteristics and the profile of attitudes towards death among nurses in a Portuguese hospital. Method: a cross-sectional, quantitative, exploratory and descriptive study, carried out in a hospital in the North of Portugal, with 981 nurses, who answered a questionnaire composed by the scale of evaluation of the Profile of Attitudes about Death. Data collection was carried out in February and March 2018 in the services, and the findings went through descriptive and analytical statistical analysis with the aid of the SPSS software. Results: the nurses revealed to have the attitudes of approach (36.29 points), fear (27.82 points), neutrality (27.25 points), avoidance (17.48 points) and escape (15.52 points) in the face of death, and these were associated with the different socio-occupational characteristics of these professionals, including gender, marital status, age, having children, type of employment relationship, professional category, specialty, time of service, and the practice or belief of some religion. Conclusion: the profile of the nurses' attitudes towards death is influenced by their socio-professional characteristics, which points to the importance of rethinking training strategies in the academic environment, in health organizations and in services, favoring the better reception of patients and family members, but also in relieving the suffering of the professionals in the face of finitude.

Highlights

Among the challenges of the professionals working in hospital services, there is the daily coping with the death of users
The Death Attitudes Profile (DAP-R) assessment scale consists of 32 items and is a scale presented in the form of a self-report, in the Likert format, from one to seven points
The findings demonstrate, as in other recent studies,[24] that the Nursing professionals have different attitudes towards the patient’s death/dying process, with influences on care

Summary

Introduction

Among the challenges of the professionals working in hospital services, there is the daily coping with the death of users. The experience of death transcends the physical event and the family relationship and confronts beings with finitude, making the nurses’ intervention at the end of life and at the moment of death dependent on multiple factors, including individual beliefs and values.[1]. The death-dying process permeates daily nursing practices; the theme is often diligent. The death-dying process is limited to the training of Nursing professionals and, when the debate occurs, it tends to happen in a fragmented manner, with little progress towards expanding and integrating this process into the life cycle.[2,3,4] A number of authors[2,3,4,5] highlighted the scarcity of research studies on the theme

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