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Evaluations of death education in nursing

1988; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/00002820-198806000-00005

1538-9804

Lesley F. Degner, Christina M. Gow,

Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology

Although Quint's research identified the need for systematic death education for nurses more than 20 years ago, few such programs have been described, and even fewer have been evaluated in the subsequent two decades. Three current approaches to death education in nursing are presented in the literature: integrating material throughout the curriculum; offering an elective course; or requiring a course. Most schools of nursing use an integrated approach without systematic assignment of students to dying patients. A critical review of 15 evaluations of death education in nursing revealed that such education may reduce death anxiety and/or improve attitudes to care of the dying, but the accumulated evidence is not convincing because of numerous problems with study design, instrumentation, and data analysis. Three central research issues need to be addressed if the profession is to determine the most appropriate method to prepare nurses for care of the dying: (a) meaningful partition of the independent variable to describe varying “doses” of death education; (b) use of longitudinal experimental designs with sufficient sample sizes to detect an educationally significant effect; and (c) definition and measurement of appropriate dependent variables, particularly those that are care related.