Examination of relationship between futile care attitudes in nurses and moral distress and intention to leave job

This study planned to evaluate nurses' attitude towards futile care and to show relationship between futile care practices and nurses' moral distress level and intention to leave job. This descriptive and relational study carried out in online survey between April-May 2021 in Istanbul. The population of research consists 478 nurses which work in Istanbul. The study conducted with 425 nurses who fulfilled the research criteria and completed entire data. The data were collected from Personal Descriptive Feature Form, The Nurses' Attitudes Towards Futile Treatment Scale, Moral Distress Scale, Intention to Leave Scale. The data were analyzed with Kruskal Wallis test, Independent Samples t test and One Way between Subject Analysis of Varience (ANOVA) by using SPSS 25 package program. In this study, majority of participated nurses (%74,4) were female, more than half of nurses (%55,8) were married and the mean age of the nurses was 29,13. It is seen that majority of nurses have bachelor's degree (%48) or master's degree (%24,7) and the average of job experience is 5 years. More than half of nurses (%51,4) stated that they have never heard of the "futile care" concept and majority of the majority of them stated that (%76,4) they have never used " futile care" concept in their working area. Considering, the fact that there are limited researches in Turkey about futile care, we can say that "futile care" is a new concept to our country and nurses in Turkey haven't got enough information about it. According to research results almost all of the nurses (%94,5) stated that they have no protocol in their hospital also more than half of nurses (%76,9) stated that they have never participate the end of life decisions. In this research, it has been seen that gender, education status, job experience and working area variables effect all the scale points. When the scale points examined, The Nurses' Attitudes Towards Futile Treatment Scale had weak positive correlation with Moral Distress Scale and The Nurses' Attitudes Towards Futile Treatment Scale had negative moderate correlation with Intention to Leave Scale. Also Moral Distress Scale had negative weak correlation with Intention to Leave Scale. Result of the research, contrary to expectation when score of The Nurses' Attitudes Towards Futile Treatment Scale has been increased, moral distress was increased but intention to leave job was decreased. It's suggested that the education and supporting studies given to nurses should be increased and new procedures about end of life treatments should be regulated.