ABSTRACT
Objective:To understand the status quo of neonatal palliative care attitude of nurses in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and analyze the influencing factors, in order to provide reference and direction for hospital management to improve the neonatal palliative care attitude of NICU nurses.Methods:A total of 237 NICU nurses in 9 hospitals in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province were selected by cluster sampling method from November to December 2021, and the questionnaire was conducted using General Data Survey, Neonatal Palliative Care Attitude Scale (NiPCAS), the Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) and Coping with Death Scale (CDS). And analyze the results.Results:The total score of the NICU nurses′ neonatal palliative care attitude was 89.35 ± 18.86. The average score of each dimension from high to low was belief, work experience, resources, organization, and obstacle; and the total score of neonatal palliative care attitude was positively correlated with empathy ability ( r=0.653, P<0.01) and death coping ability ( r=0.597, P<0.01), in addition the factor of barrier was negatively correlated with empathy and death coping ability ( r=-0.602, -0.526, both P<0.01) Multiple linear regression analysis showed that educational background, whether nursing dying infants, frequency of attending hospice nursing education in hospitals, empathy ability and death coping ability were the influencing factors of neonatal palliative care attitude, which could explain 47.3% of the total variation. Conclusions:NICU nurses′ neonatal palliative care attitude was generally at a moderate level, and affected by five factors such as education. It is suggested that hospital management should provide to improve empathy ability and death response ability as the premise of personalized, diversified education training support, multiple ways, multi-level improve its empathy ability and death coping ability, improve neonatal palliative care attitude, and then improve the quality of nursing service.