Study of Nurses Attitude toward End-of-Life Care of Patient Hospitalized in Intensive Care Units

Identifying and documenting nurses' attitudes to end-of-life care helps to plan and integrate needed interventions to correct and evaluate them based on weaknesses. The purpose of the present study was to determine the attitude of intensive care units (ICU) nurses toward end-of-life care.

A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted at two referral university hospitals in Goran, Iran in 2019. Through consensus sampling 101 nurses of ICUs were enrolled in the study. Data were collected via the Frommelt Attitudes Toward Care of the Dying Scale (FATCOD). Data were analyzed by independent t-test, correlation coefficient, Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis tests at significance P-value<0.05.

The mean score of nurses' attitudes toward end-of-life care was 105.25±8.77. 95% of nurses gained high score regard attitude toward patient care at the end of life. There was a significant relationship between nurses' attitude toward end-of-life care with type of employment (P-value=0.009) and job position (P-value=0.003). Ethical Considerations: All the principles of ethics in research such as; obtaining informed consent and confidentiality of the individual identity of the participants were observed.

The attitude of intensive care unit nurses towards end-of-life patient care was positive. Sensitizing nurses through training in this type of care and obliging the government to formally hire nurses can affect nurses' caring attitudes.