THE EFFECT OF DEATH EDUCATION ON THE ATTITUDES OF NURSES TOWARD CARING FOR THE TERMINALLY ILL.
Contributors: Drake University.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 81
Subjects: Education, Health.; Education, Guidance and Counseling.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: The problem. This study was to determine if a death education program which centers on psychospiritual aspects of death and dying had a significant effect on the attitudes of the participants toward palliative care for the terminally ill. Palliative care was conceptualized as the process of making a terminally ill person as comfortable as possible during the last stages of life, when cure is no longer possible.

Procedure. A pretest-posttest-followup test control-group experimental design was used in this study. 142 Chinese nurses and nursing students were randomly assigned to three groups: the experimental group which participated in the death education seminar (43 subjects), Control Group 1 which participated in an unrelated seminar (56 subjects), and Control Group 2 which received no treatment (43 subjects). The fifty-item questionnaire, The Care Givers Inventory (CGI), and the fifteen-item questionnaire, the Templer Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), were administered to all subjects among three groups in order to measure their effect on the attitudes before, immediately after and one month after the experiment. The t-tests of paired comparison with matched samples and independent samples were used in data analysis.

Findings. With respect to the CGI, findings indicated that the death education program was effective in increasing the positive attitudes of the nurses who participated in the seminar, but a return of death anxiety following a period of time away from the content of the death education seminar. The findings also revealed that without on-going death education, feat of death was highly variable, widely dispersed and increased with time. Concerning the DAS, findings indicated that the death education program was effective with regard to death anxiety, although there was a decreased effect with time. Findings from the program unrelated to death education showed that death anxiety increased with time.

Conclusion and recommendations. The nurses and nursing students who participated in the death education program indicated a considerable interest in the topic of psychospiritual aspects of palliative care and entered the discussion with enthusiasm. The differences between pre-test and post-test scores of the Death Anxiety Scale and the Care Givers Inventory indicate at least a minimal level of success. This study should be replicated to further investigate the effects of death education on the attitudes of doctors and/or medical professionals toward caring for the terminally ill over different countries. It would be more fruitful to view death education programs from different time frames and intervals.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-10, Section: A, page: 3843.

Thesis (ED.D.)--DRAKE UNIVERSITY, 1995.

School code: 0387.