Kontakt 2012, 14(1):21-29 | DOI: 10.32725/kont.2012.004

Nursing diagnosis "Death anxiety" in Czech nursing practiceNursing

Helena Kisvetrová

Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, Fakulta zdravotnických věd, Ústav ošetřovatelství

The target of the article presented here was to find how the nurses in the Czech Republic identify the anxiety about death in patients and whether they use the nursing diagnosis "Death anxiety" in nursing plans for patients.
The group included 468 general nurses from hospices, oncological and haemato-oncological departments, institutions for long-term treatment, old people's homes and homecare agencies in the Czech Republic. A semi-structured, non-standardized questionnaire with Likert scales was employed. The research was implemented from January to May 2011. The results were processed by the use of the descriptive statistics, squared chi test with the Bonferroni significance correction and Mann-Whitney test.
Almost half the total number of nurses (47.0%) reported that they relatively frequently encounter patients suffering from anxiety about death at their working site. Signals resulting in the identification of the anxiety about death were categorized depending on diagnostic elements of the nursing diagnosis "Death anxiety" (00147) in the NANDA International taxonomy. The following diagnostic elements occurred most frequently: "reports negative thoughts related to death and dying" (38.7%), "reports deep sadness" (36.8%) and "discussions on topic of death" (32.9%). Only 42.3% of nurses reported that they use the diagnosis "Death anxiety" in their nursing plans. In the diagnostic element: "reports negative thoughts related to death and dying", there was a significant dependence between the rate of occurrence and type of the institution (p

Keywords: death anxiety; nursing diagnosis; NANDA; patient at terminal stage of disease

Received: September 23, 2011; Accepted: November 29, 2011; Published: March 16, 2012  Show citation