Nurses' attitudes towards the care of the dying
Creators: name: Garossino, Candance Jo
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2010

description: Terminally ill patients and their families describe hospital care as nonsupportive to their needs during the final phase of life. Nurses generally are not comfortable with a supportive role when caring for the dying and tend to adhere to a curative role. The purpose of this descriptive, correlational study therefore was to describe the attitudes of general staff nurses working on medical-surgical units in hospitals towards the care of the dying and to ascertain the relationship between these attitudes and the education and experience of the nurses. An adaptation of the model for role episode, conflict, and ambiguity by Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek and Rosenthal (1964) was the applied theoretical framework. The sample consisted of 197 randomly selected registered nurses employed full or part-time on general adult medical-surgical hospital units in British Columbia. The majority of the sample were married, Protestant females, between the ages of 26 and 45 years who were prepared at the diploma level in nursing. The mean length of time worked as a nurse was 8.5 years with a mean of 7.5 years on medical-surgical units. Attitudes towards the care of the dying were generally ambiguous, neither negative nor positive as measured by scores obtained on the ‘Questionnaire for Understanding the Dying Person and His Family’. Additionally, half the respondents did not believe that nurses should be the primary health care professionals equipped to deal with the emotional reactions of the dying yet three-quarters of the sample believed that patients turned to nurses to discuss such emotional issues. Data revealed that close to two-thirds of the respondents had received structured death and dying content in their basic nursing education yet less than half furthered their death and dying education since graduation. Overall death education for the sample was low. A small positive correlation (r=-0.26) was found between respondents' death education and their attitudes towards the care of the dying; no significant association was found between respondents' level of general nursing education and their attitudes. Although there was variability in the amount of professional and personal death experience, over half of the respondents experienced between one and three terminally ill patient deaths on their medical-surgical units per month. Additionally, the majority of respondents had experienced the death of an immediate family member. Overall death experience was low to moderate. A small, but significant positive correlation (r=0.24) was found between overall death experience and attitudes' towards the care of the dying; no significant association was found between general experience and attitude. Findings suggest that supportive nursing care is not being demonstrated with dying patients and their families. However, the influencing natures of death education and death experience on nurses' attitudes are positive, thereby providing the nursing profession with two possible ways of positively influencing nurses' attitudes to the care of the dying.