Investigation of attitudes toward death and hospice care in nursing students before internship

Objective To investigate nursing students' attitudes toward death and hospice care before they start clinical practice, analyze the correlation between the two attitudes and compare their differences in junior and regular nursing college students. Methods A cross-sectional study was adopted to investigate the attitudes toward death and hospice care in 232 senior nursing students at school. Instruments included the Chinese version of the Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R) and the Chinese version of the Frommelt Attitude Toward Care of the Dying Scale-Form B (FATCOD-B). Pearson correlation analysis and independent t-test were used to analyze the data. Results The mean scores of the 5 dimensions of death attitude were neutral acceptance (4.10±0.43), fear of death (2.76±0.66), death avoidance (2.73±0.74), approach acceptance (2.61±0.58), and escape acceptance (2.48±0.75), respectively. The total score of hospice care attitude was (107.63±8.45), which was negatively correlated with fear of death (r=-0.247, P<0.01), death avoidance (r=-0.278, P<0.01), and escape acceptance (r=-0.145, P<0.05) scores and positively correlated with neutral acceptance score (r=0.405, P<0.01). The death avoidance score of regular nursing college students was significantly lower than that of junior nursing college students (t=-2.043, P<0.05), and the hospice care attitude score of regular nursing college students was significantly higher that of junior nursing college students (t=2.639, P<0.01). Conclusion There is a big room to improve nursing students' attitudes toward death and hospice care. Strengthening end-of-life care education is imperative. Key words: Hospice care; Death attitude; Education; Nursing; Students