Death Anxiety and Terminal Care Stress among Nurses and the Relationship to Terminal Care Performance / 한국호스피스완화의료학회지

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: This study was conducted to examine how nurses' death anxiety and terminal care stress affect their terminal care performance in the clinical setting. METHODS: The study enrolled 180 registered nurses with experience of attending dying patients at a university hospital located in Seoul, Korea. Collected data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA and Pearson's correlation using SPSS 18.0 for Windows. RESULTS: Nurses showed significant differences in the level of death anxiety and terminal care stress as well as terminal care performance by working division, marital status, educational background and hospice training. A significant relationship was found between terminal care stress and terminal care performance. CONCLUSION: The study results showed that efforts to ease nurses' death anxiety and terminal care stress could improve their terminal care performance. Further study should be conducted to investigate other factors that affect nurses' terminal care performance from various perspectives and develop a terminal care manual which can be used as guidance for nurses in charge of terminal patient care.