Thanatology Students’ Attitudes When Facing Patients Death

Background: Health professionals constantly face patients’ death in their work places, along with a series of changes that develop during the mourn process of the human being in both, patient´s relatives and themselves. They intervene in some steps of the process since, consciously or unconsciously they interact with the hospitalized dying patient and relatives, either in a public or private institution. Health professionals receive some training in the subject, but it is not common so that they seek to get it. The aim of the study was to identify the attitudes of the thanatology diplomat students when facing death in their professional and personal lives, in order to promote their continuum improvement in thanatology attention.

Methods: the study was quantitative, observational, descriptive, cross-sectional and prospective; a questionnaire was applied to 33 students of the thanatology diplomat from National Autonomous University of Mexico with hospital practice. The questionnaire had 7 items with a Likert scale of frequent, infrequent, never, that included the variables of study, such as death process in different life steps, death due to suicide, sudden death, due to HIV/AIDS, etc. An Excel data base was created and descriptive statistics was used in the analysis.

Results: When a child was dying, 27 students were empathetic in communicating affection and companionship during the process, while the rest had difficulty doing so. For the death of the adolescents, 27 students behaved empathetic and affective, while 2 showed difficulty in accepting the death of the patient and the rest avoided interaction with the patient and relatives. In the case of adult death, 28 students behaved empathetic and affectionate; while for the older ones, 24 students behaved empathetic and affective, 3 believed it as a natural process that comes to an end.

Conclusion: Attitudes of thanatology diplomat students facing death, along their professional and personal lives improve once they received information for dealing with patients and relatives.