Attitudes of medical students toward thanatophobia

Abstract

Inroduction: Studies show that people who have incurable diseases say that most of the time the doctor (and other medical staff) spends with them, they feel ignored, as if they did not exist. The assumption is that the main reason for this is thanatophobia, apropos of fear of death. Dying patients cause this discomfort, because they remind doctors of their own mortality. The Aim: To show the attitude of medical students towards incurably ill (dying) patients. Material and Methods: The research covered 64 fifth year, medical students (28.6% male) with an average age of 23.5. The research is approved by the authorized Ethical committee and all data subjects signed an agreement. Sociodemographic questionary and the scale for diagnosing thanatophobia were used. The scale has seven items which are answered with degrees on Likert scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Results: The average score on the scale was 31.59. Male students scored higher (32.39) than female students (31.29), but this difference didn’t have much statistical significance (F = 0.61; p=0.44). The economical status nor relationship status didn’t make any statistically significant differences. Conclusion: The results are similar to previous researches, and show that students mostly have a negative attitude towards dying patients. This directly indicates that there is a need for some extra educational program about dying patients.